Spherical Cow
A high volume fraction sphere packing library
Based on the advancing fronts algorithm outlined in Valera *et al.*, [Computational Particle Mechanics 2, 161 (2015)](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40571-015-0045-8).
> Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia.
> A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place.
> The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader.
> Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum".
# Usage
Complete documentation can be found at [docs.rs](https://docs.rs/spherical-cow/).
A simple example to get you packing spheres of radii (0.1..0.2) into a container sphere of radius 2.
```rust
use spherical_cow::shapes::Sphere;
use rand::distributions::Uniform;
use nalgebra::Point3;
fn main() {
let boundary = Sphere::new(Point3::origin(), 2.0).unwrap();
let mut sizes = Uniform::new(0.1, 0.2);
let spheres = spherical_cow::pack_spheres(boundary, &mut sizes).unwrap();
println!("Number of spheres: {}", spheres.len());
}
```
More elaborate examples can be found in the [examples](examples/) directory.
# Output
True to its name, it is indeed possible to build a spherical cow:
You can run this example yourself from [show_in_cow](examples/show_in_cow.rs).
# Example use cases
The paper which this algorithm comes from gives two examples of real world use cases:
1. Sphere packing a skull model to study fractures due to shocks and penetrating objects.
2. Sphere packing a cutting tool to identify the failure / breaking points when the tool is placed under load.
The reason this library was initially written was to optimise the layout of inflatable [space habitats](https://github.com/Libbum/space-habitats) which may one day be constructed on the Moon and Mars.
# License
Licensed under the Apache License, [Version 2.0](http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0) or the [MIT license](http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT), at your option.
These files may not be copied, modified, or distributed except according to those terms.
[](https://app.fossa.io/projects/git%2Bgithub.com%2FLibbum%2Fspherical-cow?ref=badge_large)
## Deeply linked dependencies
The [wayland-protocols](https://github.com/Smithay/wayland-rs/tree/master/wayland-protocols) library (released under an MIT license) is used by [kiss3d](https://github.com/sebcrozet/kiss3d) and [obj](https://github.com/Smithay/wayland-rs/tree/master/wayland-protocols), both of which are only extant in the examples directory of this project (and thus are NOT a part of the library).
Content therein: the file `misc/server-decoration.xml`, is Copyright (C) 2015 Martin Gräßlin and licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public Library, version 2.1. You can find a copy of this license at [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html)
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