Procedural Rock Generator Lite
Procedurally generate custom 3D rock meshes and bake PBR textures using GPU Compute Shaders. Use 3D noise to sculpt geometry and scatter the results across your terrains. Free Lite version.
by Veridian Systems
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Rock Generator Lite is a free procedural rock generation tool for Unity. It lets you create custom rock meshes, bake texture maps, generate clean prefabs, and test simple terrain scattering workflows directly inside the Unity Editor.
This Lite version is intended as the entry point for the Rock Generator workflow. It is useful for testing the generator, learning the controls, and creating individual rock assets. If the workflow fits your project and you want to use it in a larger production environment, Rock Generator Pro is the recommended upgrade.
Rock Generator Pro includes the Lite workflow and expands it with batch generation, a more advanced placer, local brush placement, higher texture resolutions, more generation and texturing options, runtime-oriented tools, and material/texture atlas combining.
Generated Rocks Are Yours
The rocks you generate with this tool are your generated output assets.
You may use, modify, sell, and redistribute generated rock meshes, materials, textures, and prefabs in your own games, demos, scenes, rendered media, asset packs, or commercial projects.
This permission applies to generated output assets. It does not grant permission to redistribute the Rock Generator Lite or Rock Generator Pro package, source code, editor tools, compute shaders, documentation, demo scripts, or other original package files.
Generated baked rocks are saved as normal Unity assets. The output can include prefabs, meshes, materials, texture maps, LODs, and optional colliders. Baked output uses standard Unity material paths where available, including URP Lit, HDRP Lit, and the Built-in Standard shader fallback. Once generated, baked rock prefabs do not require Rock Generator Lite MonoBehaviours to function as normal environment assets.
Lightweight Package, Generated Output
Rock Generator Lite does not ship with pre-made rock meshes, large texture libraries, or finished rock prefab libraries. The package is small because the included rocks are generated from code-based presets and procedural settings.
The package includes 35 quick-start mathematical presets. These presets are intended as starting points that can be edited, randomized, and regenerated with different seeds.
Preset styles include standard environment rocks and more stylized mineral or biome examples, such as:
• Alien Geode
• Deep Sea Hydrothermal Vent
• Geometric Bismuth Cluster
• Frost-Rimed Alpine Spire
• Scorched Meteorite
• Banded Iron Formation
• Folded Metamorphic Schist
Because the generator is seed-based, each preset can produce a wide range of related variants. The goal is not to ship a fixed rock library, but to let you create the rock assets your project needs.
Core Rock Generation
Rock Generator Lite starts from a procedural base shape and applies configurable displacement, proportions, and noise controls.
Main shape controls include:
• Base Topology: Choose between Icosphere and CubeSphere base shapes. Icosphere works well for rounder boulders and organic shapes. CubeSphere is useful for blockier formations, slabs, pillars, and structural rock forms.
• Size and Proportions: Control target diameter, prefab scale, fixed proportions, or seed-based randomized proportions.
• Macro and Detail Noise: Shape the large silhouette separately from the smaller surface breakup.
• Fractal Modes: Use Standard, Billow, Ridged, PingPong, and Swiss Erosion modes to create different displacement behavior.
• Domain Warping: Add folded or flowing distortion for compressed or metamorphic-style shapes.
• Voronoi: Create cellular cracks, facets, and mineral-like forms.
• Terracing: Create stepped and layered shapes for sedimentary rocks, slabs, and cliffs.
LOD generation is built into the prefab output. Rather than relying on a general mesh-collapse operation, the generator creates LOD meshes from different procedural resolutions. This helps keep the LODs predictable and avoids some of the UV and normal problems that can come from blind mesh reduction.
Procedural Texturing and Baking
Rock Generator Lite supports several output texturing workflows.
• Vertex Colors: Store procedural color data directly in the mesh. This can be useful for stylized, mobile, VR, or lightweight projects. A material or shader that reads vertex colors is required for this mode.
• Procedural Texture Bake: Generate texture maps from procedural color, slope, cavity, normal, metallic, and smoothness settings.
• Triplanar Input Bake: Use your own tiling albedo and normal textures as input, project them onto the generated rock, combine them with procedural overlays, and bake the result into regular texture maps.
Texture baking uses a GPU Compute Shader. The baker can generate albedo, normal, packed mask, metallic, ambient occlusion, height, and smoothness-related outputs depending on the selected settings.
Lite texture baking is capped at 1024x1024. Higher resolutions are available in Rock Generator Pro.
Color and Surface Options
Rock Generator Lite includes three main procedural color patterns:
• Slope & Cavity: Blend colors based on surface direction and cavity-style detail.
• Sedimentary Strata: Generate layered horizontal banding for sandstone, shale, cliffs, and sedimentary forms.
• Organic Patches: Create patch-based color variation for moss, lichen, mineral variation, and general breakup.
The texture baker also includes procedural bump and micro-detail options for normal maps, plus simple metallic/mineral styles:
• Ore Veins
• Cavity Deposits
• Crystalline Nodules
These mineral styles affect the baked material output. Lite does not generate separate physical crystal geometry. More advanced generation and texturing workflows are part of Rock Generator Pro.
Live Preview Workflow
The Rock Window is the main design workspace. It includes a settings panel and a 3D preview viewport so you can adjust the rock and inspect the result before saving a prefab.
The preview workflow separates shape iteration from final asset output:
• Fast Iteration: While editing shape and color settings, the tool can preview generated geometry and vertex-color style feedback without saving assets to disk.
• Baked Preview: When using a texture bake mode, you can refresh the baked material preview to inspect the generated albedo, normal, mask, and mineral details before generating the final prefab.
• LOD Inspection: The preview window includes an LOD selector with triangle count information so you can inspect how the generated rock changes across detail levels.
• Wireframe Overlay: Where supported by the graphics API, the preview can display a wireframe overlay for checking topology density and LOD structure.
Demo Orchestrator
Rock Generator Lite includes a Demo Orchestrator to help you test the workflow without setting up a scene from scratch.
The Demo Orchestrator can:
• Generate a temporary Unity Terrain test canvas.
• Create simple procedural terrain textures and terrain layers.
• Generate a demo rock from a preset or custom RockSettings profile.
• Send the generated rock to the Rock Placer for scatter testing.
• Purge generated demo assets when you are done testing.
The demo scene and demo helper content are provided for onboarding. They can be safely removed after you understand the workflow. The core generator does not depend on the demo scene.
Rock Placer
Rock Generator Lite includes a basic terrain scattering utility.
The Lite Rock Placer works with Unity Terrain and supports:
• Prefab palettes
• Weighted prefab selection
• Spawn count
• Random scale range
• Slope limits
• Height limits
• Surface alignment
• Vertical sink offset
• Simple Perlin-noise clumping
This placer is useful for testing generated rocks and creating simple scatter layouts. It is intentionally basic. Rock Generator Pro includes a more advanced placement workflow with additional placement controls and local brush placement.
Scaling Up with Rock Generator Pro
Rock Generator Lite is meant to give you a clear way to test the workflow before upgrading. It can generate usable individual rocks, but it has limits that matter as your project grows.
Rock Generator Pro is the recommended version for production use. It can do the Lite workflow and adds tools for larger-scale asset generation, placement, and optimization.
Rock Generator Pro adds:
• Batch Rock Generation: Generate organized sets of rock variants from profiles instead of creating one rock at a time.
• Advanced Rock Placer: A more capable placement workflow, including local brush placement and additional placement controls.
• Material and Texture Atlas Combiner: Combine textures and materials into atlases for rocks and other assets. This helps reduce material fragmentation and can improve batching or instancing opportunities in larger scenes.
• Higher Texture Resolutions: Bake above Lite’s 1024x1024 texture limit, including 2048x2048 and 4096x4096 workflows.
• More Noise and Shape Options: Additional generation methods for a wider range of rock forms.
• More Texturing Options: Additional ways to texture generated rocks and use more texture inputs.
Support the Tool
If Rock Generator Lite helps you test the workflow or create useful rocks for your project, consider leaving a rating or review on the Unity Asset Store. Reviews help free tools stay visible and make continued maintenance easier to justify.
Related Veridian Tools
• Rock Generator Pro: The full version of this asset, with batch generation, higher texture resolutions, a more advanced placer, runtime-oriented tools, and material/texture atlas combining.
• Texture Converter: A GPU-based tool for channel packing, resizing, and adjusting texture maps.
• Mesh Constructor: A utility for combining or organizing dense prefab setups into more optimized static mesh structures.
• BurstLOD: A tool for generating runtime or Editor-based LODs for custom meshes and environment assets.
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