Chris Maryan wrote:
> 
> I've noticed a number of cool looking images rendered in POVRay that
> involve balls/marbles/whatever stacket to look like a random pile (most
> notably the image that's on the POVRay 3.02 splash screen). Each of
> these images looks like the objects do not intersect but just touch. How
> is this usually done? Should I do the math (seems complicated) or is the
> only way to just guess and test-render?   [... snip]

One place to look for something like this might be Benoit B.
Mandelbrot's
(yes - _the_ Mandelbrot) book "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", chapter
18,
where, among other things, he discusses "Apollonian packing". This is a
situation where you fill a space with the largest circle that can fit in
some space (say, a triangle) and continue filling the remaining smaller
spaces with the largest circles possible, which are, of course, smaller
and smaller with each iteration. Ideally, with an infinite number of
circles,
the space is completely filled (in the fractal sense) with circles

It doesn't have anything in the way of an actual algorithm, but it might
provide a few keywords to search for in other sources. 

That book is published by W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, NY, USA.
The ISBN is 0-7176-1186-9

It's a fascinating read, even if it doesn't directly help you out with
the 
spherical packing problem.

-jr-
 
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