Generators and scenes

The Voxel Generators section fills a model with things you did not draw: terrain, trees, water, buildings, caves, whole scenes. Every generator works on the model you have selected, and every press is one undo step.

How the shelf works

1. Select (or enter) a voxel model. A bigger grid gives a generator more room: try 128 or 256.
2. Open Voxel Generators and click a generator in the grid ①.
3. Adjust its Settings.
4. Press Generate.

Below the grid (scroll the sidebar down):

1. The generator’s own Settings: here Terrain’s Island, which sinks the ground towards the edges.
2. Generate, and Replace Last under it.
3. Output: Add or Replace.
4. Colours: Height Bands here, with a colour and a top height per band.

Replace Last (on by default) means pressing Generate again takes back the previous result first. Change a slider, press Generate, and the result is re-rolled rather than piled on top. Once you have edited the model since, it stops doing that, so your own work is never taken back.

Output: Add or Replace, and colours

Setting	Meaning
Add	Fill only empty space and keep everything already there
Replace	Throw the model away and keep only what is generated
Single	One colour throughout
Surface and Depth	One colour for the top, another below it
Height Bands	Colour by altitude (sand, grass, rock, snow), with a band count and a top height per band
Use Active Colour	Take the first colour from the swatch you are painting with

Generators that only repaint (Weathering, Surface Pattern, Colour Randomiser, Colour Gradient) or only remove (Damage) hide Add/Replace, because it would make no difference.

Every generator has a Seed. The same seed and settings always give the same result, so if you like one, note its seed.

The generators

Every setting of every generator is listed in the Generators reference.

Ground and landscape

Generator	For
Terrain	Ground from five sources: Noise (fractal hills), Peaks (exactly the number of mountains you ask for, on flat ground), Dunes, Volcano, or a Heightmap image. Peakiness flattens valleys while keeping peaks; Terraces, Island and Basin reshape the result.
Platform	One flat-topped block of land with cliff sides, arena-sized
Sky Islands	Floating islands with grassy tops, rocky undersides and waterfalls
River	A river carved across the ground from one side to the other
Water Level	Floods every empty space below a waterline: sea, lakes, puddles
Caves	Tunnels and caverns carved under the surface, or a cave block cut from solid rock if the model is empty
Craters	Impact bowls with raised rims and dark ejecta

Nature

Generator	For
Trees	Branching trees standing on whatever surface is there
Rocks	One hero boulder, or a field of them. Facets make stone, Squash makes slabs, Strata adds bands, Sink beds them into the ground.
Scatter	Plants library shapes over the surface: trees, rocks, flowers, props. Filter by slope, height and density; limit it to a Selection.
Vines	Hanging from ledges, climbing walls, or creeping over the ground, with leaves and branching
Clouds	Puffs: rounded heaps on a level base, with the second colour on their undersides. Layer: a ragged sheet of cloud from noise.
Crystals	Pointed crystal clusters on floors, walls and ceilings
Ore Veins	Seams of ore colour threaded through rock
Coral	Branching, brain, fan and tube coral and kelp on a seabed

Structures

Generator	For
Buildings	Houses, a village, a castle or a pier on the ground
City	A street grid of towers, offices and houses on a levelled site
Monuments	Pyramids, temples, pagodas, stone circles, obelisks, rock arches
Bridge	A bridge across the river if there is one (run River first), otherwise over the narrowest gap it can find: stone, wood, rope or moon bridge
Walls & Fences	Castle wall, field wall, palisade, fence or hedge round the model
Dungeon	Rooms and corridors with walls and a floor. Each room becomes its own group.
Maze	A perfect maze, or a braided one with loops
Paths & Fields	Worn tracks joining points, or a patchwork of fields, over the whole model, the active group, or a selection
Ship	A galleon, sloop or rowboat afloat as near the middle of the water as it fits, or wrecked on the bed

Space

Generator	For
Planet	A round world with continents, seas and ice caps
Asteroids	Lumpy rocks adrift through the model, or a belt of them

Finishing: repaint and wear

These change what is already there.

Generator	For
Weathering	Snow on tops, moss on shaded sides, grime in crevices
Damage	Bites out of walls, crumbled tops, pitted surfaces. It turns a building into a ruin and only ever removes. Keep Bottom protects the ground; Broken Colour repaints fresh breaks.
Surface Pattern	Bricks, tiles, checker, stripes, diagonal, weave, raked sand
Colour Randomiser	Repaint from a weighted set of palette colours
Colour Gradient	Repaint along a ramp between two palette entries

From an image

Generator	For
Picture	An image as a flat voxel picture, or a solid carved from front, side and top views

Recipes: layering generators

Generators are made to be pressed one after another, each in Add mode. Here’s Terrain, then Water Level, then Trees, on a 96³ model:

More recipes:

• Island: Terrain (Replace) → Water Level → Trees → Rocks → Weathering
• Ruin: Buildings → Damage → Vines → Weathering
• Cave level: Caves → Crystals → Ore Veins → Scatter (props on floors)
• Moon: Planet → Craters

Scatter, Rocks and Vines all find “the ground” the same way, so a boulder field and a wood over it agree about where to stand.

Colour generators and the palette

The Colour Randomiser and Colour Gradient take their colours from the swatches you picked in the palette.

• Add Colours (Randomiser) adds every picked swatch at once. From Palette loads a palette and fills the list evenly from it (up to 64 colours).
• Take Picked Swatches (Gradient) uses the two ends of the picked run. Shift-click one of a built-in palette’s eight-step ramps and the gradient becomes exactly that ramp.

Gradient options: Direction (X, Y, Z, Radial or Spherical), Fit (across what it paints, or across the whole model so separate parts line up), Steps (flat bands), Bias and Dither.

Both can be limited to the Active Group.

Picture: images into voxels

Pick an image in Blender, then choose:

• Flat Picture: one voxel per pixel, standing up in the View you choose, Thickness voxels deep.
• Carve From Views: two or three images (front, side, top) each cut through the block, leaving only what all of them agree is solid. It’s a quick way from a character sheet to a blocked-out figure.

Width sets how many voxels wide the result is, and Mirror flips it. Colours are matched to the model’s palette.

Scene: a whole scene in one press

The Scene generator runs a recipe of other generators in order: ground, water, rocks, trees, weathering, clouds. One press builds a finished scene.

Setting	Meaning
Scene	The preset (below)
Seed	One number seeds every step
Sea Level	How high the water comes, as a fraction of the grid (0 for none)
Vegetation, Rocks	How much of each, 0 for none
Clouds, Weathering	On or off
Cutaway	Opens the front of underground scenes so you can see into the caves
Water Colours	Gives the water palette entries a real water surface

The 33 presets: Highlands, Island, Canyon, Forest, Winter, Ruins, Swamp, Desert Oasis, Volcano, River Valley, Crystal Cavern, Mine, Mushroom Grotto, Village, Farm, Harbour, Graveyard, Floating Islands, Castle, Modern City, Space, Tiny Planet, Sci-fi Colony, Coral Reef, Pirate Cove, Frozen Lake, Jungle Temple, Egyptian Desert, Stonehenge Moor, Zen Garden, Mountain Pass, Walled Town, Battlefield.

A Scene is a starting point: every step it ran is a normal edit, so keep building on top of it.

Big grids

Generators write in bands and never build a grid-sized array, so a 1024³ terrain takes about a second. The limit is your viewport: a very large, very detailed model is many chunks to draw. See Performance.