Tessellate

Constant

The component's bounding box is mapped to each face's bilinear patch, with uniform thickness along the normal. Predictable, fastest, and correct for panels, tiles, bricks and studs.

Adaptive

As constant, but faces the driver attribute rates highly are subdivided before placement, so copies crowd where the field is strong. Detail sets how many times a face may divide, one to three. Use it when you want density to follow a field rather than size.

Frame

Generates an inset frame per face rather than copying a component. Frame thickness and depth are separate controls: thickness insets the ring in the plane of the face, depth extrudes it. This is the fastest route to a lattice with no component modelling at all.

Patch

For quad grids only. The component is mapped across a block of faces with bicubic interpolation of the base surface, so the result runs smoothly across face boundaries instead of restarting at each one. This is the mode that produces genuine woven and continuous results — and the reason a weave component looks like basketry rather than a row of separate arcs.

Face

The flat face normal. Copies stand perpendicular to their own face and there is a visible discontinuity between neighbours. Correct for anything that should read as faceted — panels, plates, shingles on a low-poly form.

Vertex

Smooth vertex normals, the default. Copies lean continuously across the surface and neighbours line up. Correct for anything organic.

Custom

Respects custom split normals on the base mesh, so a mesh with deliberately authored shading drives the tessellation the same way it drives the shading.

Even thickness

Normalises the Z offset by the angle between the vertex and face normals, so thickness stays uniform on a curved base instead of pinching in concave regions. Off by default because it costs a little and only matters on strong curvature.

Thickness±4

Height above the surface as a multiple of the face it sits on. Being relative rather than absolute is deliberate: the look stays the same whatever size the base object is. Negative values push copies inward.

Constant

Same thickness on every face.

Face area

Scales thickness by face area, so copies on big faces are proportionally taller. On a seashell or any mesh with graded face sizes this alone produces a convincing result with no field at all.

Attribute

Driven by the Driver attribute — any vertex group, colour channel or float attribute. This is where Fields plugs in.

Offset±5

Shifts every copy along the normal, before thickness. Use it to sink components into the surface or float them above it.

Scale0.01 – 2

Size of each copy within its face. Below one they shrink and sit apart; at exactly one they touch edge to edge and can be welded into a continuous shell.

Default

Follows each face's first corner. Deterministic, and on a regular grid it produces a regular result.

Random

Seeded random quarter turns. Breaks up the grid without destroying alignment.

Attribute

Angle read from the driver attribute, 0–1 mapped to a full turn. A noise field here gives continuously varying orientation rather than four discrete options.

UV

Aligns to the base UV direction. This is the one that gives grain-following results — wood, fabric, brushed metal, anything with a direction that should survive across the whole surface regardless of how the faces happen to be wound.

Diagonal

Aligns to the shorter diagonal of each face. On an irregular quad mesh this keeps components from being stretched along the long axis.

Step offset0 – 3

Whole quarter turns applied to every face on top of the mode. The cheapest fix for a tessellation that is correct but facing the wrong way.

Random

Weighted random choice. A slot with weight 3 appears three times as often as one with weight 1.

Attribute

The slot whose range contains the face's driver value. Set ranges of 0–0.33, 0.33–0.66 and 0.66–1 and you have three components graded by a field — small buds where curvature is low, large pods where it is high.

Material

The face's material index becomes the slot index. Paint materials onto the base and you have painted which component goes where, with full control and no fields involved.

Index

Cycles through slots by face index. Produces a regular repeating sequence — useful for brick courses and woven alternation.

Boundary faces

Full

Treated like any other face. The default.

Skip

Left empty, so the pattern stops short of the edge.

Cap

Filled with a flat face, closing the shell.

Clip

The component is truncated at the boundary.

Ngons

Triangulate

Split into triangles before tessellating. The default and usually right.

Skip

Left empty.

Fan

Fanned from the face centre, which keeps a radial arrangement that triangulation would scramble.

Merge seams

Welds component boundary vertices shared between adjacent faces. The tolerance is derived from average edge length rather than being an absolute distance, so it works the same on a two-metre model and a two-centimetre one. On by default.

Merge distance

Explicit removal of doubles after welding, for components whose own geometry has coincident vertices.

Strict topology

Guarantees zero ngons in the output. Anything that would produce one is triangulated or quad-split. The count is reported in the result line, so 0 ngons is a fact rather than a hope. Turn this on for anything going into a game engine or a subdivision workflow.

Quadrangulate base

Merges base triangles into quads before tessellating. Useful ahead of Patch mode, and useful whenever a triangulated import is producing twice as many copies as you wanted.

Shade smooth

Computes sharp edges from the fold angle and marks them, rather than shading the whole result smooth. A freshly built mesh has no sharp-edge data, so without this every hard corner would render rounded.

Keep surface

Whether the base surface remains in the output beneath the copies.

Hide sources

Hides the base and component objects after a successful run, so you are looking at the result rather than the result plus its ingredients.