Chipped Flow

I have a bazillion DIP chips because years ago a hackerspace was shutting down and was going to throw out their large collection. I took it off their hands and have been lugging it around ever since.

After coming across it in my studio junk I started thinking about quick projects that I could do with the parts. I thought it might be fun to lay them out using a generative system in Houdini . The exercise turned into an exploration of different packing methods. Also I made a little procedural DIP chip generator asset in Houdini which was fun.

1. Convert a baby face to topographical lines
2. Generate ribbons wider than the DIP chips along the lines
3. Use the UV Layout geo node to pack DIP chips into the ribbons.

Tada:

Same method but with lines generated from a noise function:

An interesting failure along the way (using point relax):

Here was a different approach using a packing method that I learned from this Entagma tutorial video on a 3D model of my head.