Click the link to see a cave creation using The IRB!

Creating a Cave with The IRB Video

Click the link for the guide video!

IRB Version 5 Guide Video

Click the link for the texture baking guide video!

IRB Version 5 Texture Baking Guide Video

The Infinite Rock Builder is the most powerful and versatile procedural rock builder on the market with many advantages over RGB textures. With 20 presets to start with, all of which can mix together, there's a lot of infinite here! Now with the additional baking controls, you can take your formations and shapes into Eevee, or other 3D software!

At some point, if you haven't already, you'll make an outdoor scene and find yourself needing an RGB texture of a rock or cliff face. You''ll come across the problem of trying to scale them without repetition and the fact that each RGB texture with all it's maps uses roughly 1 GB of memory for a 4K texture. If you can't find the right texture or material, you'll probably move on to sculpting one which is time consuming and difficult.

I've done all of the above and sculpting was always a last resort as so much detail is required to make a convincing rock formation that I find difficult to achieve with the sculpting tools. In the below Avatar inspired image, I sculpted all of the cliffs and owing to how many subdivisions I needed to get detail into them, this was about as many as my system could handle using an RTX 2060 without crashing at render. Each one took around half an hour or longer including the painting so you can see how much time I spent on them!

With The Infinite Rock Builder, I could have made each one in minutes and used roughly 2/3 less memory.

The Infinite Rock Builder is a procedural texture that comes with an infinite amount of customisation for making rock and stone surfaces to be used in Cycles, be it boulders, rocky ground or cliff faces. With the Infinite Rock Builder, you just apply the material and use any of the controls to customise the rock surface to your heart's content. It comes with 20 individual rock presets, all of which have their own controls to customise them further. Because the material is based on maths and not image data, it uses up to 2/3 less memory than a standard 4K RGB texture freeing up your memory for more complex scenes without sacrifice. Another advantage over an RGB texture is that it will scale infinitely without repetition, so creating a huge cliff face can be done in minutes with the IRB instead of hours. 

If you're new to Blender, that's perfect as you won't be searching for RGB textures, you won't need to mess around with UV's or the mapping issues and there won't be issues with setting up the displacement. And don't be intimated by the controls, you can still get the best out of The IRB because it's mostly experimentation with the controls. Sliding sliders about, changing a few values, that's all the input required so you can see changes very fast just by moving a slider. As you can see from the below image, all you need to do is apply the material to a plane or shape, and the IRB will do all the shape changing for you!

In the below image, the IRB works wonders on the mountain in the background, it makes a very realistic texture without repetition just by applying it to a default landscape mesh. All of the boulders are just unedited spheres with the back faces deleted to help the whole scene render with just under 1gb of memory.

Truly, an infinite amount of rock or stone formations and surfaces can be created with the IRB, it's unlikely you'll make the same formation or surface twice! With its ability to scale infinitely, there's no need to worry about repetition anywhere on the mesh as everything is created procedurally. The below image is the main control group for the IRB v5.0 where all the controls you need to make your rocks are all here. You can also enter the group to make even more refinements to your shape.

This image was created using the Infinite Rock Builder for the cliff face and the Infinite Metal Builder for everything else and again, no RGB textures.

UPDATE TO v5.3 17.08.24

Hi all!

I had a look at the IRB to see where I could improve it in any way, and thanks to a very helpful user of The IRB, I've added an extra set of controls to most of the formations. In the image below, the standard formation is on the left and the image to the right of each one is the variation using the new controls. 

It's a little bit more infinite with different results to the already accessible controls. 

In order to use the new controls, just TAB into the main group and at the bottom of most of the individual formation groups, you'll find a new section labelled 'Experimental'. I couldn't think of any descriptive name and the whole thing is experimental, but it's the best name I could come up with as you won't have a clue what it'll do until you experiment!

The latest version 5.3 is in the downloads.

Enjoy!

Nick 

UPDATE TO v5.2 21.11.23

****I have found that when I open a file and save it in Blender 4.0, it no longer opens in previous versions. For this reason, version 5.1 is still in the downloads if you're not ready to update to 4.0

Hi all!

It's been a while, but now that Blender 4.0 is here, I need to update all of the Builders to incorporate the new features of certain nodes, starting with this one, The IRB. The Voronoi texture has changed significantly for the better, along with great additions to other nodes. 

For this reason, I've now updated the Rock Builder to v5.2. There's one change to the main group and lots of additions to the formation groups themselves. So to add even more infinite to the infinite that's already there, when you're happy with your formation selection, tab into the main group, find the formation you like and fiddle with the new controls. There's mainly Detail, Roughness and Lacunarity controls added, but they make huge differences to the formations that weren't available before. Experimentation is the key here!

Update Info:

• Moved the Sea Colour up to the upper part of the main group as I didn't realise this was affecting parts of the colour of the formations. Think of it as an addition to the main colours.

• Added Detail, Roughness and Lacunarity controls to the formation groups inside the main group so now they use the full functionality of the new Voronoi and Noise textures.
• Formations unaffected - 3, 10 12, 14, 20 - the new controls didn't add enough to the formation shape to warrant needing controls for them

The two pictures below show Formation 1 with the standard settings, and the second image shows Formation 1 using the new Voronoi Textures.

UPDATE TO v5.1

08.10.22

Hi all!

I've updated the IRB to version 5.1 as I finally realised I'd limited 10 formations using Object Displacement needlessly. Now all 20 formations use Tangent Displacement, (the naming convention is just because that's the name of the differing displacement space the formations used) so they can all be applied to the same shapes, 2D or 3D. It's visually explained in the image below, but now instead of Tangent and Object Formations, you now have Formations 1-10 and 11-20, all of which use Tangent Space.

I've kept them separate from each other for a number of reasons, but one of the bonuses is that you can apply Cliff-Top Flatten to formations 1-10 separately to 11-20, which creates even more possibilities for your formations and now if you make a 3D shape, you can mix all 20 formations together, rather than just 10.

The latest file is in the downloads. Rock on y'all!

Nick

UPDATE TO v5.0

10.12.21

Hi all,

I'm proud to announce the latest version of The Infinite Rock Builder, version 5.0. There's been a complete overhaul and a few new formations to swap out a few I wasn't too chuffed with. 

When I switched over to Blender v3.0, now that the wires are all different colours, it's impossible to hide them so I had to find a way to make it look as clean as possible and that meant doing something I previously thought impossible; to have the whole IRB in one group.

And now it is. Now every control for the IRB is in one group and accessible by either tabbing through, or a quick mouse move. Now that the main shader is completely decluttered, it means far quicker changes can be made and with far less mousing about. There's still a few wires that I can't hide, but I've limited the visibility of them as much as is possible in the latest Blender.

I also changed a few formations, both in Tangent and Object as I wasn't massively happy with a few in the previous versions.

The only thing that isn't there yet is the previously added texture baking functionality, this is the next thing I'll be doing before I move on to tearing apart all of the other builders.

I hope you like the new version and I hope you can see how much of an improvement it is to the whole process, and mostly, I hope you have as much fun with it as I do.

Kindest regards,

Nick

UPDATE TO v4.7

21.09.21

Hi all,

I've made a few changes to the how the 20 formations display at their default settings, which are the settings I just think look the best to see all the details. In 4.6, some of the formations were far stronger than others in their default state, I've just made some strength changes to bring them all closer together.

I noticed that in Object Formation 5, the strength only affected part of the formation, so I've connected both parts under one Strength slider.

I've turned off Moss and Cliff Top Flatten as I think it could be confusing if it wasn't something you originally wanted. Now you can just turn them up if needed.

I also changed the background colour to hide the wires a little better. When Blender updated recently, for some reason they changed their colour grey. 

Version 4.7 is in the downloads.

Finally, if you're enjoying using the IRB and it's serving its purpose for your work, please take a minute to leave some feedback to help more people trust in the product. It'd put a smile on my face and I'd be very grateful for this.

Kindest regards,

Nick

UPDATE TO v4.6

26.05.21

Hi all,

I've updated the IRB to version 4.6 as I've improved the cliff top flatten controls and added an Object / UV Mapping slider to all of the formations. It's all best explained in the video at the link below.

I've put the latest v4.6 master file and manual in the downloads section.

Kindest regards,

Nick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sArhksLxEk&list=PL_8QZ-hJT-uIPCsdVWGJ-BuIwf3qJkXlF&index=17

A QUICK UPDATE

01.01.21

Hi all,

I've added a new feature called Cliff Top Flatten, which limits the strength of displacement from the top-down of an object. I had a situation where I had quite a heavily displaced cliff face, but I needed the rounded off top area to be flattened out ready for grass etc. The controls are all explained in the latest documentation so have a quick peak if you need to use it.

It looks like this for 3D shapes;

And like this for 2D shapes;

The latest version, 4.3, is in the downloads. Grab the latest manual as well as these new controls are explained quickly on the second page.

Rock on.