The Raspberry Challenge

Dear THUG members,

Our next meeting is approaching and will be held at the same place (OverDraught Irish Pub) on Wednesday, March 21st, starting 7:00pm.

As mentioned before, it would be good to have an interesting technical Houdini challenge to chat about and give people enough time to experiment on their own, if they wish.

I'd like to setup the first one and people are more than welcome to think about other challenging ideas for the meetings to follow.

I'm sure there are multiple ways of (procedurally) achieving this, therefore this is a great way to challenge people to think and share their ideas.

If you have ever seen a raspberry:
(http://www.flameia.com/dtop/photos/raspberry-1600.jpg)

their individual parts (or whatever you call those things), are squashed against each other, forming the general shape.

If you were to populate a piece of geometry with another (it could be a bunch of spheres on a larger sphere or anything else), how would these squash and scale as if they're pressing on one another (as opposed to inter-penetrating)?

I've already come up with a prototype for one concept. I'd like to hear more ideas as mine is probably not the most efficient one.

Give it some thought and let's bring up ideas next week.

See you then,

Amir