The autoPACK software lies at the heart of cellPACK and can be used more generally to pack any recipe of objects into anything.

Who uses autoPACK?
Stanford Bunny autoFilled voxels From artists to engineers– Anyone who needs to pack any volume and/or surface with any recipe of any number of discrete objects of arbitrary shape.

Why use autoPACK?
autoFillDensePack Most popular 3D software programs now contain robust physics engines based on Bullet that can separate small collections of overlapping objects or allow volumes to be filled by pouring shapes from generators, but these approaches fail for large complex systems and result in either overlapping geometry, crashed software, or non-random gradients. Most packing algorithms are designed to position objects as efficiently as possible, but autoPACK allows the user to select from random loose packing to highly organized packing methods–even to choose both methods at the same time.


The autoPACK website contains detailed information on autoPACK capabilities and installation. The autoPACK website has grown out of control over the past 2 years and will be cleaned and refined in the spring of 2015.

Figure 1. autoPACK is a software program that packs objects into volumes with zero overlaps.


The autoPACK software (invented by Graham  Johnson and initially developed in Arthur Olson's lab by Johnson, Ludovic Autin, Michel Sanner, and Mostafa Al-Alusi, under the guidance of David Goodsell and Arthur Olson) provides the core packing algorithms and framework used by cellPACK.