Spreading micromirrors evenly across surface of a helmet model (Particle effect, procedural, instancing) I am doing a pre-visualization of an art installation. It looks a bit qwirky ;)
It is to remember the fall of the berlin-wall etc. etc. 

So it will be old helmets plated with small mirrors arranged in a very large ball / flower. 

BUT the question is, how do i get the tiny mirrors to spread evenly without clipping into each other on the mesh evenly? 
I wanted to do that effect for a long time already on a couple of projects. 

I thought i could instanciate the micro mirrors onto the surface with a particle emitter and use the normals of the surface etc. 
OR alternatively spawn at each vertices a mirror plate. Yet it would be very hard to make them even like a disco ball. 

Do you have any ideas? here is a video of the status quo (sorry for the quality) VIDEO of the status quo

The first original helmet looks like this:




i tried your question. 
Though i think from the method it is very much like extruding individual faces right? Not entirely sure how it does it ;D to be honest. 

here is the result, i believe because of the (rather unclean) mesh topology I can not go that route if I would have to make all faces evenly first. 

MAYBE: i could use something like cloth simulation? I could make a "fabric" (just joined mirrors as plane ) and stitch it to the surface? Does anyone has experience with it?
You can use the Tissue addon.



The addon will tesselate a given shape on a mesh.

Select a tile, shift select your mesh, and use 'tesselate':



From that, if you want to modify the original mesh, you can come back to the tesselation and refresh it.