Turning ANYTHING into Rocks - Blender Geometry Nodes
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users link it as the reference method for procedural rock and cobblestone surfaces, and they cite it when they follow along and hit errors or want to extend the technique.
Recommended by 3 people across 2 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What it is
A Blender geometry nodes tutorial on Default Cube (CG Matter) that shows how to turn any mesh into a covering of interlocking procedural rocks or cobblestones, built from a viral tweet by Hans Chiu. It walks through the node setup step by step over about 21 minutes.
What people said
Recommends oliwoli · 2022-04 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “geometry nodes: prevent instances from overlapping”
Hmmm.. It won't help with the intersecting but what you could do is convert them into volumes and back into a mesh in geometry nodes, which kinda smoothes out the intersections and makes it look like they clump together. If you really need them to not intersect, this tutorial [this video] might be helpful:
Recommends common_goldfish · 2024-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Instancing faces as objects”
Your objects are not rotating correctly for a couple reasons. Applying scales/transforms is a good step. To make sure your objects' origins are correct, you can select them and use (f3 to search) Origin to Geometry. Separate and Reset Children can both be checked if you don't want the instanced objects to move when you move the corresponding collection info objects. Adding a Normal Node to the align rotation can help to rotate instances correctly. In the image below all instances are basically walls of the default cube with noise textures: [LINK] If this solution still doesn't work for you, and you are more interested in stacking all these irregularly shaped rocks, you can try this node tree
Recommends Brief · 2024-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Baking procedural material from procedural model”
I'm pretty new to Blender and so have only used it occasionally for small tasks that are not possible in 3DS Max. What however blew me away completely yesterday is the procedural stuff! So I went ahead and turned an imported FBX model into rocks following this tutorial (pure magic tbh!): [this video] The result looks like this: [LINK] As you can see both the model and the material (because of the blending overlap required for the rocks) are now procedural. However I do need to export what I'm seeing here with UV Maps and a standard baked texture. I tried a few tutorials for that (e.g. this one: [LINK] ) but the problem is that once I'm switching for the UV Editing tab for baking, this one only "s
Cites Fabian · 2022-03 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Geometry Node - Extrude Mesh is not solid”
I'm doing a pretty cool geometry node tutorial for blender 3.1 right now and can't find my mistake. Why are my mesh stones not closed? Anyone see my mistake? [LINK] [LINK] [this video]
Cites A modeler in need. · 2022-06 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Why am I missing nodes in my geometry nodes editor?”
I'm currently following along with this tutorial [this video] , and at 1:20 and 2:00, I noticed that in the add menu, I simply don't have the nodes "integer" or "dual mesh". They just don't exist, this has sparked quite a lot of confusion, and upon a google search, there was nothing I could find. Could use some help. cheers.
Cites Xfacter · 2022-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to rotate elements of a mesh (a.k.a Mesh Islands) individually in Blender 3.3 Geometry Nodes”
TLDR: I need to randomly rotate meshes within an object individually (based on their individual origins), using Geo nodes. We now have a " Scale Elements " Node in Geometry Nodes that will take separate parts of a mesh and scale each according to a value that you choose. What I am trying to do is very similar to this node but instead of scaling I want to individually rotate the different parts of a mesh that are separate from one another. The separate meshes of the same object might be described as "Mesh Islands". The Mesh Island node seems confirm this as it indexes each of my rock meshes as a separate 'island'. The ability to rotate mesh islands individually would be very useful in my proj
Cites TheBeautifulOrc · 2022-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to avoid other meshes when creating "cobblestone" with Geometry Nodes”
Inspired by this popular CG Matter tutorial [this video] I set out to make my own object covered in cobblestone. With the method shown in the tutorial the individual stones interlock perfectly, making this technique different from randomly scattering objects. [LINK] However when trying to deal with objects protruding through the cobblestone surface I quickly ran out of ideas to avoid intersections. I would like the stones to stay clear and nicely "incorporate" the red protrusions. [LINK] I tried both the Raycast and the Geometry Proximity nodes in order to clear out space for my protruding objects but ultimately had no success, especially when trying to account for objects with varying sizes (com