Rhea

Working well

Use cases

Rhea is a general toolkit, which makes it hard to see what it is for. These are complete routes through it for specific kinds of work, with the decisions that matter called out.

Architecture and facades

The field Rhea was shaped by. Everything from the panelisation of a curved facade to a gridshell that has to stand up.

A panelised curved facade

  1. 01

    Start from your surface

    Your own massing model, or a Vault or Saddle to develop against.

  2. 02

    Get even quads

    Lloyd relax with preserve shape on, then Triangles to quads if it arrived triangulated. Panel sizes should be consistent before anything else.

  3. 03

    Check planarity before you design the panels

    Analyse planarity with the overlay on. This decides your whole approach: a single-curvature surface is already buildable from flat glass; a doubly-curved one is not, and you need to know that now rather than later.

  4. 04

    Planarise, or subdivide, or triangulate

    Planarise if a little shape change is acceptable. Subdivide the worst regions if it is not. Triangulate if nothing else works — three points are always coplanar.

  5. 05

    Apply the panel treatment

    Hex panels for a faceted skin, Louvres for shading blades, Portholes for a perforated screen. Drive perforation density with a slope field and the openings respond to sun exposure.

A gridshell that stands up

  • Saddle base, Diagrid effect, applied.
  • Hanging chain solve with the boundary pinned. Flip vertically — the lattice is now in compression rather than bending.
  • Planarise so the infill panels are flat.
  • Waffle or contour output for the physical model, nested and labelled.

Product and industrial design

Weight reduction that looks intentional

Bone lattice driven by a thickness field: the lattice densifies where material is thin and opens up where it is thick. This is the actual logic of trabecular bone, and it produces parts that read as engineered rather than decorated.

Grip textures and heat sinks

  • Grip. Stud or Frustum component, live tessellation, driven by a vertex group you painted where hands go.
  • Heat sink. Fin component with Tilt raked to the airflow direction, Coverage at 1, no randomness. Regularity is the point.
  • Ventilation. Ring or Star component with a gradient field driving size, so openings grade across the surface.

For 3D printing

Run a thickness field first and look at the heatmap. It will find the regions below your printer's minimum wall before the slicer does. Turn on strict topology, and check for non-manifold output before exporting.

Film, VFX and concept

Creature surfacing

Scales and armour
Scale component, tessellate Scale slightly above 1 so they overlap, small Tilt, driven by a curvature field so scales enlarge over the joints.
Spines and quills
Spike component, Height high, Taper around 3, Wobble around 20°. Coverage below 1 so they cluster rather than covering everything.
Cilia and hair
A thin component with high Height and strong Taper, scattered. The taper is what distinguishes hair from bristles.
Skin markings
Reaction-diffusion to a colour attribute. It follows the surface with no UV seams, which no texture can do.
Coral and reef
Differential growth in mesh mode, then the Coral effect over it. Two scales of the same logic.

Alien architecture

Conway operators are the fastest route to structures that feel designed by something that is not us. Chain four or five operators on a dodecahedron, canonicalise, then apply a structural effect. The result is regular enough to read as built and unfamiliar enough to read as not ours.

Games and real-time

The constraint here is that everything must be clean and everything must be cheap.

  • Turn on strict topology. Zero ngons, confirmed in the result line. Non-negotiable for a subdivision or normal-bake workflow.
  • Leave merge seams on. Unwelded seams break normal baking and lightmap UVs.
  • Preserve UVs from the base. Each copy inherits the base surface's UV coordinates, so a single texture can drive the whole tessellated result.
  • Bake, do not ship. Generate the high-poly in Rhea, bake it to a normal map, ship the low-poly. This is what the module is for in a game pipeline.
  • Use generated vertex groups. Tessellate writes boundary, top and bottom groups per copy, which are directly useful for masking in a shader.

Jewellery and small objects

  • Filigree. Voronoi cell borders with a fine width on a smooth form, then a thickness field to check nothing is below your casting minimum.
  • Settings and pavé. Ring or Stud components, seeded by a Poisson distribution so the spacing is even without being a grid.
  • Faceted surfaces. Gem component, or a Conway chamfer chain with angle-based shading so the facets read.
  • Woven bands. Patch-mode tessellation with the Weave component on a Torus. Continuous across face boundaries, which is what makes it read as woven rather than as separate arcs.

Print, laser and CNC

See Panelize and fabricate for the full detail. The short version:

  • Laser-cut model. Any form → waffle with your measured material thickness → test joint → nest → SVG.
  • Stacked contours. Slice with fixed spacing matching your material, label the parts, cut, stack.
  • 3D print. Thickness field first to find thin walls, strict topology on, watertight check before slicing.
  • CNC. DXF export, kerf set to the full bit diameter, and check your export scale twice.

Motion graphics

  • Keyframe Thickness on a cellular effect: a shell that grows closed.
  • Keyframe Coverage on a tessellation: components populating a surface over time.
  • Keyframe Twist: a field of fins winding up.
  • Animate the base and leave the effect alone. Deform the surface with a lattice or an armature and the pattern follows it, which is almost always more interesting than animating the pattern itself.
  • Bake growth to frames for organic growth animation, which cannot be reconstructed from a property value.