Stonework - A Blender add-on to create stone walls

blenderaddons-ng

There are other options out there, (including my own, probably broken add-on) to create stone walls, but I wanted to try our how easy it would be to create a new add-on that would fit the development and testing framework I am creating, so I created this mesh generator that creates a wall of bricks or stones, with several options to randomize and tweak it.

It creates a clean mesh, although currently it does not add uv-coordinates.

It can be downloaded directly from here, or you might want to have a look at the repository and see what it is about.

Description

Brainrot warning: The following description was generated by an LLM

The add-on  provides an operator that creates a customization "stonework" wall mesh made up of rows of randomly sized rectangular stones separated by configurable gaps. The main features and functionality are:

• Adds a new mesh object to the scene representing a wall made of stones.
• Customizable wall dimensions: You can set the total width and height of the wall.
• Configurable stone size: Control the minimum and maximum width of stones, the height of each row, and the width of the first stone in each row.
• Randomization: Stones in each row have random widths (within user-specified limits), and you can set a random seed to get a different placement of the stones.
• Gaps between stones: You can specify the width and depth of the gaps between stones, making the wall look more realistic.
• Half-stone probability: Optionally, some stones can be half-width for a more natural, irregular pattern.
• Mesh construction: The add-on ensures all faces are connected, merging vertices where stones meet and splitting faces where a vertex lies on another face’s edge.
• Extrusion: Stones are extruded along the Z-axis by the gap depth, giving the wall a 3D appearance.
• User interface: The operator appears in the "Add" menu in the 3D Viewport, under the name "Stonework Wall".

This add-on is useful for quickly generating stylized or realistic stone or brick wall meshes for architectural visualization, games, or other 3D projects.

DryStone: create irregular stone walls, uvs and random vertex colors

I commited a small feature update for the Drystone addon. It now generates a (possibly random) uv-map and a vertex color layer with random colors. This makes it quite simple to use a stone texture for the whole wall while enhancing the effect of separately cut stones and slightly irregular coloring.

(The texture used in the image was RockSediment0105_1_L.jpg from CGTextures)
The node setup used for the image looks like this:

Availability

The updated addon is available from GitHub.

DryStone: create irregular stone walls

It's been a while but I haven't been completely idle during the holiday season: In this post I am happy to present a small Blender addon that creates walls of irregular stacked stones.

Inspired by the walls of the castles at Conwy and Beaumaris this addon aims to produce irregular walls, resembling the ones shown below.

For quite some time Blender users have known the excellent masonry addon but I wanted irregular walls (and a proving ground for serious bmesh programming).

The addon offers a number of controls to tweak the appearance that should be quite self explanatory. It's available from GitHub and discussed in this BlenderNation thread. Download it and select File->User Preferences->Addons->Install from file to install it and it will then be available in the Add->Add mesh menu in the 3D view.

The mesh that is created consists of separate n-gons and the depth is provided by a solidify modifier topped by a bevel modifier. Currently you will have to do the uv-unwrapping yourself. The image at the start was created with a procedural stone texture.

Interested in a professional add-on to capture all kinds of mesh characteristics into vertex groups or vertex colors? Then have a look at my WeightLifter addon on BlenderMarket. (In the first image it was used to quickly assign a random vertex color to each block to vary the coloring and bump mapping for each separate block).

Irregular stone patterns in OSL, a first attempt

On the BlenderArtists forum a member was analyzing irregular stone walls and posed the interesting question: does this resemble a tree pattern and can it be done in OSL? Quite a lot of thinking and tinkering is needed for a full solution put in this post we explore some of the basic requirements.

Irregular stone patterns

A sample pattern with primary colors, Mondrian eat your heart out :-)
The sample image shows that we have generated a pattern consisting of rows with different heights, each consiting of stones of varying width. Additionally, some stones within a row are further split horizontally. The code to generate the pattern is shown below:

shader stones(
  point p = P,
  vector Scale = 1,
  float w = 0.02,
  float s = 2,
    
  output float Fac = 0
){
  point Pos = p * Scale;
  
  float bot = floor(Pos[1]-1)+cellnoise(Pos[1]-1);
  float lev = floor(Pos[1])+cellnoise(Pos[1]);
  float top = floor(Pos[1]+1)+cellnoise(Pos[1]+1);

  if( Pos[1] < lev ){
    Pos[0] += s*cellnoise(Pos[1]);
  }else{
    Pos[0] += s*cellnoise(Pos[1]+1);
  }
  float left = floor(Pos[0]-1)+cellnoise(Pos[0]-1);
  float mid = floor(Pos[0])+cellnoise(Pos[0]);
  float right = floor(Pos[0]+1)+cellnoise(Pos[0]+1);
  if( 
    ((Pos[0] > left+w) && ( Pos[0] < mid - w )) 
    || 
    ((Pos[0] > mid+w ) && ( Pos[0] < right - w))
  ){
    if( 
      ((Pos[1] > bot+w) && ( Pos[1] < lev - w )) 
      || 
      ((Pos[1] > lev+w ) && ( Pos[1] < top - w))
    ){
      int stoneindex=0;
      float seeda = left;
      float seedb = bot;
      float bounda = mid;
      float boundb = lev;
      
      if( Pos[0] > mid ){ stoneindex += 2; seeda = mid; bounda = right; }
      if( Pos[1] > lev ){ stoneindex += 1; seedb = lev; boundb = top; }
      int pattern = (int)floor(cellnoise(seeda,seedb)*4);
      if( pattern == 0 ){
            // horizontally halved
            float nlev = (seedb + boundb)/2;
            if( (Pos[1] > nlev - w) &&  (Pos[1] < nlev + w) ){
              Fac = 0;
            } else {
              Fac = cellnoise(vector(seeda,seedb,Pos[1]>nlev));
            }
      } else {
        Fac = cellnoise(vector(seeda,seedb,-1));
      }
    }
  }
}

(The code is also available on GitHub.)

Sample node setup

The example image at the top of this article was made with the following node setup (click to enlarge)
:

Further work

Obviously we need more sub patterns for the individual stones and add some distortion to the underlying coordinates to make really random stones. It would probably also be a good idea to vary the spacing between the stones and use the output value to drive displacement and bump maps and the code could certainly do with a bit of cleanup but I thinks this approach is at least shows promiss.