Self Assembling Tetrahedra

Hi all,

I have been building a model that takes tetrahedra held together using stiff springs and attracts them to each other using a P-Law to attempt to build a tetrahelix and other related forms.

Essentially:

-Tetrahedra held together by stiff springs

-All tetrahedra vertices attracted to each other with an exponent of -3

-All tetrahedra centres weakly repelled from each other using a P-Law to avoid tetrahedra fitting inside of each other.

I have managed to get this to work as long as the tetrahedra do not approach each other too quickly. If they do, they often slot inside one another. This happens more and more as the number of individual tetrahedra is increased.

Any ideas about how to alter the definition to allow me to increase the number of individual tetrahedra to around 200 would be fantastic!

Many thanks,

Dan Dodds

Attachments:

111116 Self Organising Tetrahedra.gh, 15 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on November 28, 2011 at 3:32pm

Hi Dan,

Something I tried when making the self assembling tetrahedra in my videos was placing a point in the centre of each tetrahedron, attached to the vertices by springs

You can then make these points act like balls and collide with each other using springs with cutoffs as shown in other examples.