Geometry nodes - instances overlapping

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Hello, as part of my quest to stop modelling absolutely everything as separate shapes I’m delving into geometry nodes.

I have a simple setup as the basis for a rough drystone wall. I’ve instanced a simple cube to a plane with some randomness in the scale, and have the points distributed using the poisson disk mode but the instanced cubes overlap in places.

Is there a way to avoid the instances overlapping? I’ve played with the poisson disk settings but still have some overlapping cubes. For close views this will not look realistic.

I did try the geometry proximity node but I don’t think I’m on the right lines.

many thanks

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Hello,

Yes poisson disk wouldn’t work in that case because distance between points is a radius.
Unless you use cubes or spheres you get either gaps or intersections.

Having non-overlapping , size varying bricks with current tool set is quite a challenge.
It’s possible with some hack but that’s way more complicated than your actual setup.

One possible way is to look into the accumulate field node :

I think by looking at how he did the row offset it’s possible to have different width :

That would give something that looks a bit like that :

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This could be interesting too :

With some work it may be possible to get to these kind of pattern :
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But still for now it’s really hard to get more randomness, and get the feeling that objects of random shapes are packed together.

needless to say, once you get the right pattern generation, depending on the approach you’ll have some constraints.
I managed to get something similar here with the boxes :

But it would need some extra work to make some curved walls of boxes.
In sort this wouldn’t apply to an arbitrary shaped mesh, like you could do with instancing points on faces. But probably with more time I could get a better result.
It was quite challenging to get to that result in the first place.

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Thanks for the reply - I was reading your buildings thread with interest and realised I should start to learn geo nodes.

I’ll give some of these methods a try, there’s no formal brief so I can adapt the style to suit.

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Hey ! cool !

Yes I think at first it need a bit of time to get what is easily doable and what can get really complicated.
My advice is to start by doing a lots of tutorials and small experiments first.

Some things can be misleading because, well it’s possible to do them, but it needs a bunch of hacks and problems solving to get there.

To give you an example, right now I’m looking into making rows of books,
Making this is fairly easy, like it takes me ~30mn :
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But now I started looking into having this kind of distribution :

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And boom, I’m really having a hard time for that, it’s the second day I’m looking for a solution and while I’m starting to get there is still some work …

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To get a better understanding of what is happening I added some geometry to help me visualize what I’m doing :

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If I succeed , I’ll probably show the result but that may be misleading, the result will probably look nice and simple, it’s doable with GN, but it involves a lot of problem solving…
Depending on the case you can have really fast results without struggling, but you may pick the hard case where things get really difficult even if visually they look simple.

All that said, geometry nodes are really fun to play with and it opens a lot of possibilities, it’s really a great tool to look into, but kind of a double edged sword.
Rule of thumb, having non overlapping geometry with current node set is tricky.

BTW, You can also look at this :

The bricks are overlapping, but still it works quite well, it gives a very natural look and it hard to see some overlap. I think that’s because bricks are generally square, so poisson disk works better.

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