Start here

Your first result

This takes about a minute. By the end you will have a coral-like shell you can keep adjusting, and you will have seen the whole shape of how Rhea works.

The walkthrough

1. 01

   Open the Rhea panel

   In the 3D viewport, press N and click the Rhea tab. Sections are collapsed by default; click a header to open one.

2. 02

   Add a surface to work on

   Open Library. You will see two galleries: bases on top, components beneath. Click Blob. A lumpy quad sphere appears at the origin, already selected.

   Any mesh works here — Rhea has no interest in whether you made it or it made itself. The library exists so you do not have to go find something first.

3. 03

   Pick an effect

   Open Effects. The gallery shows twenty-seven thumbnails. Click Coral.

4. 04

   Apply it

   Press Apply recipe. Rhea subdivides the surface to a useful density, runs a reaction-diffusion pattern across it, and attaches a live engine driven by that pattern. A few seconds later you have branching coral.

5. 05

   Now change it

   This is the part that matters. Below the button, the effect's own controls appeared. Drag Thickness. Drag Variation. Change Seed and get a different but equally valid coral. The result rebuilds as you drag.

The third click

You now have three ways forward, and they are the three ways forward from every result in Rhea.

Keep tuning

Leave it live and go on adjusting. Add Symmetry and the pattern runs continuously across the mirror seam rather than being duplicated. Keyframe Thickness and the coral grows over time. See Symmetry and animation.

Stack another effect

Press Add effect and choose a second engine. It runs on the output of the first, so you can put a lattice over your coral, or displace it, or tessellate scales across it. See Stacking effects.

Apply and move on

Press Apply. The modifiers collapse into plain mesh data. From here it is an ordinary Blender object: sculpt it, retopo it, export it, put it in a game. Nothing about it remembers Rhea.

The shape of the thing

Every workflow in Rhea, however elaborate, is the same four steps you just did:

  surface        →  what you are covering
     ↓
  field          →  a number per vertex that varies across it
     ↓
  engine         →  the rule that turns surface + field into geometry
     ↓
  live result    →  adjustable, animatable, applyable

Simple mode chose the field and the engine for you. Advanced mode is the same pipeline with you choosing each stage. That is the entire difference between them.

Three more worth two minutes

• Saddle + Diagrid. A gridshell roof, the real structural kind. Then open Structure and relax it.
• Torus + Woven. Interlacing strands running over and under each other around a closed loop. Good for seeing what Coverage and Twist do.
• Cube + Conway ktI. Skip the gallery entirely and go to Conway operators. There is a visual picker, so you do not need to know what ktI means yet.