[Addon] Rock Builder

I saw the tutorial by Zacharias Reinhardt on a way to build rocks in Blender, and I thought of how easy it would be to write an add-on to do what he does. :eyebrowlift: …So I wrote an add-on that does just that. You can check it out here on GitHub:

It’s pretty straightforward, but I would recommend you watch the tutorial first so that you will know where exactly all the settings are coming from:

(Click to see full res)



Cool! Thanks for sharing!..

Can you build a material-node-setup around it, like in the rock essential demo?:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/blenderguru.com/uploads/2016/08/nKey_jpg-450x257.jpg

Thanks for good job

@mkbreuer The rock essentials takes a completely different (pre-made, photo-scanned models) approach. While I won’t be copying what they’ve done, I will be adding material and texturing tools at some point. This add-on is designed to help people just make some simple background rocks very quickly that can have a procedural material applied.

@urkokul Thanks, I hope it’s helpful!

Hi, the add-on doesn’t appear in the Add-ons tab. I downloaded the rock_builder-master.zip, used the Install from File in the Add-ons tab.

The installation seems ok as I have the message in the Info view : “Modules Installed from ‘E:\3D_Blender\Add-ons\rock_builder-master.zip’ into ‘C:\Users\Owners\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\addons’ ()” but I can’t see it to activate it :(.

@Manolo76 Thanks for downloading this! This is a .py add-on, not a zip. GitHub will only let you download the zip, so you’ll just need to unzip it, and install the “rock_builder.py” file.

Ah ok, as some add-ons can be installed from .zip and as I didn’t have any error message, I didn’t think about just extract the .py file. It works now, thanks and thanks for the add-on ;).

@Manolo76 Awesome! Glad it works for you…

I downloaded this addon and gave it a quick try. It’s amazing; excellent work!

@EEEnt_OFFICIAL Thanks! Good to hear that it’s useful.

thanks so much for sharing this, it’s very useful.

A suggestion, do you think it could be possible (or desirable) to give an option to auto-generate a group of rocks? Once the primary or hero rock is created perhaps just some parameters to make slight variations in seed, size, and number… just a thought. This would make it very useful when creating rock piles for example.

@comeinandburn You’re welcome! I will definitely look into that…I think that would be a great addition. The easiest way would be to do a group of rocks in a grid, and let the user put them together in a pile or whatever.

@comeinandburn You’re welcome! I will definitely look into that…I think that would be a great addition. The easiest way would be to do a group of rocks in a grid, and let the user put them together in a pile or whatever.

Edit:

DONE!!! Please go checkout the feature branch on GitHub and let me know what you think.

Tried with blender v2.77x and 2.78a, but cannot be enabled


@Tosky Hmm, very peculiar, I’m researching this. Are you sure that you didn’t change the file, name, or anything at all before installation?

Update: I see that you’re using the batch branch…

Update: I just tried something that may work for you…please try it again from batch here.

Sorry for this very late response, RL bothered me.

I’v just tested the batch (using just blender 2.78a), seems it work just fine :slight_smile:

No working for me I can’t find it anywhere Addons neither in Panels. I did download the latest batch you suggested and moved it over the Addons folder as well as trying installing it from Blender. 2.78a

@animani Most likely you tried to install the zip file…unzip the file, then install the .py file with Blender.

Just tried once again but the addon does not appear in the addons either the T panel.

Try adjusting your filters to be for all add-on types (community, testing, etc.) and all add-on categories in the user prefs, then search for “rock”. Most likely you have a filter on that is keeping you from seeing this add-on, and if you don’t enable it in the add-on user preferences, it won’t show up anywhere else.