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Introduction

A powerful Blender extension for procedural and parametric geometry generation. It brings real-time tessellation, polyhedral operators, attribute fields, pattern simulation, constraint-based form finding, and fabrication output into one non-destructive workflow, where every operation remains editable, animatable, and reversible at any stage of the process.

Rhea — feature highlightWatch on YouTube

What it does

Blender is very good at letting you model a thing. It is much less good at letting you describe a thing — a rule, repeated, that produces a thousand variations of itself across a surface. That is the gap Rhea fills.

You give it a surface and a rule. The rule might be put this scale on every face, and make it taller where the surface curves sharply, or turn this cube into a polyhedron nobody has named yet, or hang this mesh under gravity and freeze whatever shape it settles into. Rhea evaluates the rule, and the result is ordinary Blender geometry you can render, export, or keep editing.

Everything stays live

This is the part that matters most, and it is the part most tools in this category get wrong. When you press a button in Rhea you do not get a frozen mesh and a rebuild button. You get a result with the recipe still attached to it.

• The controls stay in the panel. Drag them and the result changes as you drag.
• The controls are real Blender properties, so they can be keyframed or driven.
• The base surface underneath can go on changing — the pattern follows it while you scrub the timeline.
• When you want a plain mesh with no machinery attached, Apply gives you one, and Revert gives you your original surface back untouched.

Two ways in

Simple mode

A gallery of thirty-two starting shapes and twenty-seven effects, each with a thumbnail. Pick a shape, pick an effect, and you have a finished result. Then keep turning dials: count, scale, height, twist, taper, randomness. Nothing about this mode is a toy — it drives the same engine as everything else, with sensible values already chosen.

Start at Your first result.

Advanced mode

The same engine with every parameter exposed: four tessellation mapping modes, five rotation sources, thickness drivers, merge tolerances, boundary handling, ngon policy, seed distributions, solver weights. Simple mode is a curated layer over this, not a separate product, so anything you build in one you can take apart in the other.

Start at Tessellate.

The modules

The Rhea panel lives in the 3D viewport sidebar under its own tab, and holds sixteen collapsible sections. In rough order of how often people reach for them:

• Library — thirty-two primitives, split into base surfaces to cover and components to cover them with.
• Effects — the one-click gallery and the stack that holds the results.
• Tessellate — the flagship. Four mapping modes, multi-component, full output control.
• Conway operators — nineteen chainable polyhedral operators with a visual picker.
• Topology tools — dual mesh, fan subdivide, rotate faces and edges, Lloyd relaxation, adaptive subdivision, tris to quads.
• Fields — eleven generators that produce a number per vertex, which everything else can be driven by.
• Differential growth, Reaction-diffusion, Surface Voronoi — the three pattern engines.
• Structure, Panelize, Fabrication — form finding, planarity, and export to a cutter.
• Overlays and Help & support — seeing the data, and finding a human.

What you need

Rhea depends on nothing but Blender itself. There is no compiler step, no wheel, no pip, and no optional accelerator that has to be downloaded to make things fast — the whole core is vectorised numpy, which ships inside Blender already.