Hi Peter!

Peter Santo wrote:

> I would like to render a sphere with an arbitrary number of points (or
> smaller spheres) on its surface that I want to distribute equally (so
> the distance to the neighbouring points is nearly equal for every
> point). I suppose there is no perfect solution for that problem, but I
> would like to approximate it as good as possible.

I had the same problem. After some time I realized that a factor of 5 works
very fine:
Solution 1: 7 points (1 at each pole and ring at 90degree with 5 points)
Solution 2: 22 points (1 at each pole, a ring of 5 points at 45degrees, a
ring of 10 points at 90degrees, a ring of 5 points at 135 degrees)
Solution 3: 47 points (1, 5, 10, 15, 10, 5, 1)
Solution 4: 82 points (1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 15, 10, 5, 1)
Solution 5: 127 points (1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 1)
... and so on ...

You cannot choose any number of points but using a factor of 5 is *very*
simple and the output looks fine. And you can choose really high numbers of
points without any complicated calculation.
A picture using this technique can be found at
http://home.ins.de/~tobias.wiersch/htm/newyear.htm

Hope this helps ...

 ... tobias wiersch

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