Sphere with Equally Spaced Holes

[redsoc]

I'm trying to create a sphere with small holes in it that are equally spaced. In essence, I'm looking for a circular pattern but in 3 dimensions. Any suggestions?

 

[Eltron]

You'll have to do a pattern of a pattern, similar to this golf ball.

Dan

http://www.eltronresearch.com

Dan's Blog

 

[SnowCrash]

Eltron's approach works, but the hard part will be getting the spaces actually even. My spherical geometry node seems to have expired . . .
What is the math for the solution for some number of features equally spaced on a sphere?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing

gives a clue. Each contact point represents the location for an equally spaced feature on the sphere. You could then pattern that pattern somehow to create the feature density you want.
"assume a spherical cow"


--
Hardie "Crashj" Johnson
SW 2008 SP4
Nvidia Quadro FX 1000
AMD Athalon 1.8 GHz 2 Gig RAM

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

In thread559-184969, rfus mentioned a macro he developed for equi-spaced points on a sphere. I believe he posted it, but I am unable to find it.

Hopefully he will see this and respond.

 

[rfus]

redsoc,

CorBlimeyLimey asked me about this and I'll try to offer some help. Plus, you have a good handle.

Fejes Tóth is the man who first solved this problem.

This is a huge problem, and I am by no means came up with the solution to it. Some things I must keep, but my macro leveraged the following.

It was solved in MATLAB by Paul Leopardi. If you have MATLAB it can be obtained, and used.

http://eqsp.sourceforge.net/

I did a lot of math and programming in engineering school, but this is a really hard problem I just found a way to put together his work, and the work done from the point import macro, and I have yet to get a delaunay macro that was posted in the SW forums into the whole thing.

If you want to see how complicated of a problem it really is, check the PHD paper he did on it in 07.

http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/~leopardi/Leopardi-Sphere-PhD-Thesis.pdf

rfus