Evenly distributing n points on a sphere

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The Fibonacci sphere algorithm is great for this. It is fast and gives results that at a glance will easily fool the human eye. You can see an example done with processing which will show the result over time as points are added. Here’s another great interactive example made by @gman. And here’s a simple implementation in python.

import math


def fibonacci_sphere(samples=1000):

    points = []
    phi = math.pi * (3. - math.sqrt(5.))  # golden angle in radians

    for i in range(samples):
        y = 1 - (i / float(samples - 1)) * 2  # y goes from 1 to -1
        radius = math.sqrt(1 - y * y)  # radius at y

        theta = phi * i  # golden angle increment

        x = math.cos(theta) * radius
        z = math.sin(theta) * radius

        points.append((x, y, z))

    return points

1000 samples gives you this:

enter image description here

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