• Disco balls have a spherical core with many square, flat mirrors glued to the sphere. The mirrors are roughly uniform in shape and size.
• Disco ball mirrors are arranged in horizontal rows, with singularities in the pattern at the top and bottom. The number of mirrors varies per row, and so does the spacing and angle between mirrors.
• Metaballs are an implicit surface sometimes rendered by measuring field density at the intersections of a 3D grid and filling in the grid spaces with polygons that match the measured state.
• The basis grid is not typically feature aligned with the balls, so the resulting mesh tends to animate in a jumpy way.

So, the approach in this capture was just to make each surface polygon into a mirror. It looks OK, but misses some of the characteristics of disco balls. In particular, I feel that having nothing but square mirrors is important to the effect. It would also be nice if the balls had singularities in the mirror pattern on the top and bottom. I have no idea how to resolve the mirror arrangement in a stable way when balls move vertically and merge. Will chew on that.

That way you can find the one that's going off the rails with all that beeping pretty quick.

I had author credits too but that took up 11,000 characters and you only get 10000.

I had author credits too but that took up 11,000 characters and you only get 10000.