In both the FCC and HCP arrangements each sphere has twelve neighbors. For every sphere there is one gap surrounded by six spheres (octahedral) and two smaller gaps surrounded by four spheres (tetrahedral). The distances to the centers of these gaps from the centers of the surrounding spheres is  for the tetrahedral, and  for the octahedral, when the sphere radius is 1.
Relative to a reference layer with positioning A, two more positionings B and C are possible. Every sequence of A, B, and C without immediate repetition of the same one is possible and gives an equally dense packing for spheres of a given radius.
The most regular ones are
*FCC = ABC ABC ABC... (every third layer is the same)
*HCP = AB AB AB AB... (every other layer is the same).
There is an uncountably infinite number of disordered arrangements of planes (e.g. ABCACBABABAC...) that are sometimes collectively referred to as "Barlow packings", after crystallographer William Barlow.
In close-packing, the center-to-center spacing of spheres in the xy plane is a simple honeycomb-like tessellation with a pitch (distance between sphere centers) of one sphere diameter. The distance between sphere centers, projected on the z (vertical) axis, is:
where d is the diameter of a sphere; this follows from the tetrahedral arrangement of close-packed spheres.
The coordination number of HCP and FCC is 12 and their atomic packing factors (APFs) are equal to the number mentioned above, 0.74.