Taking a cluster of points and moving them on to a circle turned it to be easier than I thought… At first it seemed more complicated to get at the points, because sometimes the Show Values on the output of a Filter node is, let’s face it, misleading. Based on what a certain Show Values showed me, I started off using arrays instead of Filters, and that made the graph a little messier.

First, I calculate the point I want to use as the center of the circle. That gives me the first vector I need.

Subtracting the CC (circle center) vector from the PP (Point Position) vectors gives me a set of vectors that take me from the circle center to the points.

I just resize the PP-CC vectors to get point positions that fit on a circle:

Circles, spheres, and radii…

For a couple of reasons, I was playing around a bit with spherifying/circulizing this weekend:

• I’ve been watching Gustavo E Boehs’ new ICE tutorial Softimage ICE Deformers, where the first deformer is a Spherify deformer.
• There was this How to align points in a circle thread on si-community.

Based on this basic idea: “every point on a sphere/circle is the same distance from the center”, I was able to rough-out a couple of ICE trees:

Creating a circle on the surface of a mesh required just a little bit of 3d vector math. Here’s a little video that goes over using vector subtraction to move a point onto a circle. I spent more time setting up the “Show Values” in my demo then I did recording the thing.