Populating a mesh surface with non-intersecting spheres using the dart throwing algorithm inside a Houdini solver.
Every @Frame a random uvw-position is tested for its distance to the uv islands of the mesh with the uvdist-function. If dist < 1e-5 the random UV position is either on the island or at least very close to its boundary. Then the corresponding world position is returned by the primuv-function and only if no other point len(pts) != 1 can be found pcfind within a randomly defined radius a new point is created. The new point's radius is written into the pscale attribute with setpointattrib so it can potentially be found in the next iterations.
vector uvw = rand(@Frame, 123);
uvw[2] = 0.0;
int pr;
vector st;
float dist = uvdist(1, 'uv', uvw, pr, st);
if(dist < 1e-5){
vector pos = primuv(1, 'P', pr, st);
float radius = fit01( rand(@Frame, 456), 0.05, 0.1 );
int pts[] = pcfind_radius(0, 'P', 'pscale', 1.0, pos, radius, 1);
if(len(pts) != 1){
int pt = addpoint(0, pos);
setpointattrib(0, 'pscale', pt, radius, 'set');
}
}
