[Addon] Blue Noise Particles

This addon is so fundamental I’m amazed no one has made it yet.

I’ve released a plugin generates a random arrangement of particles with a blue noise distribution. This is also known as Poisson Disk Sampling.


This distribution of particles guarantees no two particles are very near each other. It’s often considered a higher quality particle arrangement than Blender’s default uniform sampling. It’s particularly useful for organic arrangements, and randomly arranging meshes without collisions.

It works with any mesh, and all of Vertex, Face and Volume emission.



As always, let me know what you think, and feel free to send me good demo example for the gallery, my programmer art leaves a lot to be desired.

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wow, this is great! thanks for sharing!

Very cool, I waited for something like this since Softimage times :slight_smile: Thank you for going at it!

Is is possible to get more than 1000 particles generated? When I set it higher it crashes blender.

Yes, it easily goes to 10000 on my PC. Can you try on lower qualities. Can you get it to crash on quality “None”?

Really cool. I searched for something like this in Blender particles options last time I wanted to generate a forest. Thanks.

Thanks for answering, using quality “none” I am able to generate 5000 particles, above it crashes blender (2.78c official).

I think I’ve identified the crash and fixed. Can you re-download the updated version, and try again?

Amazing! Great addon.

I’m getting a crash whenever I set ‘Volume’, no matter what quality setting I use:

http://pasteall.org/pic/index.php?id=115550

I was hoping to get a more even particle distribution in a volume, as blender’s defaults seem to concentrate the particles at the center of the sphere’s volume.

By the way, is it not possible to add this arrangement option in the Particle system of Blender so it can be used “live” or it’s too complex to implement ?

Gimble: I’ve fixed the problem with volume issues. The addon does space out volume particles more evenly than blender’s defaults, but it still suffers a bit from the same issue.


Manolo76: The addon is a bit too slow to update everytime something changes. It would have to be a change to core blender to support that. I had a look at doing so and it is pretty feasible, but I think the devs are planning to rewrite the particle system from 2.8, so I won’t try until then.

I’d recommend until then you use a built in particle system for “live” and then switch to this addon when your mesh is mostly done.

Ok thanks :).

cool, it works now, thank you!

Thank you so much for this great Python script BorisTheBrave.

I tried a quick test, and I’m getting much improved results.

http://pasteall.org/pic/index.php?id=115568

A slight lag at High quality (on a ~10 year old computer), but nothing serious.

Thanks for sharing

I added a new feature that let’s you generate “patchy” particle distributions. Could be handy.


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@BorisTheBrave , this addon is great. I use it quite often in 2.79. Any plans for updating it for 2.8?

This will be so useful! I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about this until just now. 2.8 needs this addon, or even to implement this kind of thing as a core feature!

Thanks for all the comments. I’ve attempted to update it for 2.8, unfortunately i’m having difficulty getting part of it working. Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks @lolwel21, I’ve got it working now.

You can download the latest version here:

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