Do Wavy Walls Really Use Fewer Bricks? I Tested It in Blender

Impact tests are not very convincing. Seems like the ball was too heavy in all tests. How far it went is mostly a factor of how the bricks fell, doesn't say much about the integrity of the wall. There also seems to be a conspicuous lack of mortar. Bricks are usually held together with mortar, not just friction and gravity (unless you're piling megalithic slabs).

The common failure mode of a long wall like this is surely the thing falling over on its side from wind and ground shifting, not having a hole punched through it.

While hardly the most scientific study of all time, it is interesting, and more importantly, it's getting geometry nodes in front of the eyes of more people on here! I want to convince people that Geometry Nodes is one of the more interesting developments in programming languages in a while! :)

Few of the ideas in Geometry Nodes are totally new, but the cultural impact of geonodes being embedded in Blender, which can be used in so many ways, is very interesting to me. Blender can be used for 2d art (Grease Pencil), 3d art (well you know this), video editing, simulations... there's a lot of reasons one might pick up Blender.

But what's really truly interesting about geometry nodes is that it's a purely functional and mostly typed declarative visual programming language with conditionals, loops, a "game engine" (simulation nodes effectively is a game engine loop), functional-programming-language-style updates to data, and even... monads! The "fields" in Blender's geometry nodes are confusing at first because they "run backwards" despite being plugged into input slots, but this makes a lot more sense when you realize you're plugging in functions to these inputs to be evaluated later, effectively monads.

And the people picking up and playing with these things and learning vector math and doing all this stuff? Largely artists! Many of them don't realize they're doing computer programming at all!

(In fact, many of them might not like to have that pointed out, because the implications of geonodes being a programming language with Blender under the GPL are... pretty curious. Pretend I didn't say anything!)

But anyway, geometry nodes are a BLAST to play with, and very useful and cool, and if you're someone on here who straddles the line between artistry and coding, you should absolutely have some fun with them!

SCIENCE!

As /u/marginalia points out, the impact tests are not necessarily the greatest measure of strength/stability. I'm not an expert but I'd think a wall like that would most usually fall over due to wind, weather/frost, plants growing into it, or the ground shifting. At a guess I'd expect an impact with a heavy object to be like, the worst-case comparison?

Even if it's a bit weaker, a wall which only uses 60% as many bricks might still be worth it. Meanwhile I'd expect a one-brick-wide straight wall to be far weaker in comparison.

There's such a wall on Fresh Pond Parkway in Cambridge, MA:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/sKDa93gtWWhvtR2u8

You can see the different mortar/brick colors where it's been repaired after being hit.

Conclusion says wind is hard to simulate. Suggestion: Add a lateral component to gravity until the wall falls over. A hacky and imperfect simulation of wind loading, but should be informative.