Grounded – Smart Scatter for Blender

Voyde Procedural in Geometry Node Groups


◆ VOYDE PROCEDURAL  /  ADD-ON  /  BLENDER 5.0+
Grounded
Smart Scatter for Blender

Dress any terrain with plants, rocks and litter in a few clicks, and keep your viewport fast.

Grounded scatters grass, flowers, trees, rocks, leaves and props over any surface. Pick one of twelve ready-made biomes, let Smart Terrain read your land, or paint where things grow.

Simple rules decide where each layer appears, and the layers relate to each other. Flowers fill the gaps in the grass, ferns clump against fallen logs, leaves pile up at walls and pebbles settle in hollows. One slider turns the whole scene to autumn, under snow or wet with rain.

Everything runs on Geometry Nodes and materials inside your file, so scenes render without the add-on.

BLENDER 5.0 TO 5.2CYCLES & EEVEEGEOMETRY NODESRENDERS WITHOUT THE ADD-ON
A grass and wildflower meadow at sunrise, with mist in the valley and dark forest on the far slope
12
READY-MADE BIOMES
395
MODELS IN 164 ASSETS
384
OF THOSE MODELS ARE CC0
8x
FASTER UPDATES WITH THE VIEWPORT BUDGET ON A 5 MILLION INSTANCE SCENE
01 — ONE CLICK
From bare ground to a finished scene

This is the Blender viewport in Material Preview. Pick a biome, click Add Biome, and every layer, rule and wind setting comes with it. The wait is cut from these clips; the time on screen is what it took on a Ryzen 7 3700X and an RTX 4060.

A bare hill in a forest valley turns into a wildflower meadow in the Blender viewport after a click on Add Biome
Wildflower Meadow
Bare earth fills with ferns, fallen logs and trunks, then the ground turns into dark humus with Blend Ground
Forest Floor, with Blend Ground
An empty sand dune fills with orange flowers, boulders and quiver trees in the Blender viewport
Desert Bloom
A bare hillside of rock ledges gets boulders, stones, dry grass and pebbles in the Blender viewport
Rocky Slope
02 — KEY FEATURES
A whole environment from one panel
◆Twelve biomes
Meadow, forest floor, rocky slope, desert, autumn street, pine forest, woodland, savanna, tropical shore, moon, wetland and coral reef, each built from linked layers you can change.
◆Smart Terrain
One click reads your land and fills water lines, slopes, flats and rocky ground with layers that follow it.
◆Live rules
Slope, height, facing, ridges and hollows, patches, open sky, image and vertex masks, Color ID maps, keep away from objects, clear or follow paths.
◆Layers that relate
Grass keeps clear of trunks and rocks, flowers fill the gaps, and any layer can grow toward another or keep away from it.
◆Gathering
Leaves at the base of walls, pebbles in hollows and corners, litter under trees, weeds along path edges.
◆Season and weather
One slider each for season, snow and wetness, in Cycles and EEVEE. Keyframe them and they render without the add-on.
◆Paint and edit
Paint where a layer grows, erase it, place single instances, then move, turn, scale or remove any one of them. A new seed leaves your edits where they are.
◆Physics Drop
Instances fall and settle like real objects. No simulation stays in your file.
◆Viewport budget
One number caps what the viewport shows; renders always get the full density. Rules you don't use cost nothing.
◆Living wind
One wind for the whole scene. Grass and flowers bend, on library trees only the leaves move and the trunks stand still.
03 — SMART TERRAIN
One click reads the land

Grounded bakes maps from your terrain and adds library layers that follow it. Reeds and flowers along the water lines, forest with ferns on the slopes, grass on the flats, boulders on sharp crests and steep ground. The zones fade into each other, and the result is plain layers you can tune or delete.

Seen from above, a bare terrain fills with forest, grass and rocks that follow its slopes and water lines
04 — BIOME BLEND
A forest that thins into a meadow

Two biomes fade into each other instead of stopping at a line. The edge follows a direction, a curve or your paint, with a soft width and some noise so it wanders.

A pine forest fades out across a meadow along a soft, uneven edge
05 — SEASON AND WEATHER
One slider, the whole scene

Season, Snow and Wetness are scene values that every material reads by itself. Only green parts of a texture turn, so flowers, bark and rocks stay as they are. Snow lies on what faces up, whichever way an instance is turned. Library assets have it built in, and one click adds it to your own.

The Season slider moves in the Grounded sidebar and a green meadow turns brown and yellow
Season
The Snow slider moves and white covers the upward faces of the plants on a meadow
Snow
A brick street turns dark and glossy as wetness rises, with leaves and litter along the curb
Wetness
06 — BRUSH
Paint where it grows

Paint a layer onto the ground, erase it anywhere, or place single instances under the cursor. Strokes live in hidden helper objects, so your model never changes and any mesh resolution works.

A brush stroke in the Blender viewport paints a band of wildflowers across a grassy hill
07 — RULES
Every rule stays live

Drag a setting and the layer follows in the viewport. Slope, height, facing direction, patches, masks and clear paths stack up, and every rule has a soft edge.

The Coverage slider moves in the Grounded sidebar and wildflowers spread over the hill
08 — GATHERING
Litter goes where it would really end up

Real ground isn't random. Leaves blow into corners and against walls, gravel rolls into ditches, needles fall under trees. Grounded's gathering rules make a layer denser in those places, or let it appear only there.

In the Autumn Street biome maple and oak leaves pile up in the gutter and along the walls, litter collects at the curb and weeds grow only in the cracks. Pick your own walls with one click.

In the Blender viewport the Gathering strength goes up and autumn leaves pile up along the curb of a brick street
09 — LAYERS THAT RELATE
Ground that looks grown, not sprinkled

Plants come in groups. One layer can grow toward another or keep away from it, and Bare Ground opens clearings at the same spots on every layer, so grass, flowers and clover leave the same ground free.

Blend Ground turns the soil into damp humus under the leaves, with bare earth between the drifts.

The Bare Ground setting goes up on every layer of a meadow and a clearing opens on the hill
10 — ARRANGEMENT
Rows, clumps and paths

Lay straight rows for fields and orchards, or put them along curves for fences and vineyards. Clumps turn every point into a parent with children around it, for tussocks, reeds and mushroom rings. Draw a curve and every layer clears the lane, or follows it.

Straight rows of plants across a green valley floor move closer together
Rows
Dry grass stands in tussocks on bare, cracked ground
Clumps
A winding lane opens through the plants of a meadow along a curve
Paths
11 — BY HAND
Move one, drop a hundred

Physics Drop lets instances fall and settle. Rocks roll into hollows and rest against each other, and no simulation stays in your file. Any single instance can be moved, turned, scaled or removed by hand. It remembers its place when you change the seed, the density or a rule, and the layer changes around it.

Rocks fall into a pit in the ground and settle against each other
Physics Drop
One boulder is selected in a desert scene and moved by hand across the sand
Hand edits
12 — NATURAL VARIATION
Dry patches, not one flat green

Dryness turns plants yellow in patches and leaves flowers and bark alone. Every plant comes out a little lighter or darker than its neighbour, and the undersides of leaves come out paler.

Dryness goes up on the grass layers and the grass turns from green to yellow in patches
13 — GROW IN
Grow a scene on the timeline

Instances rise from the ground over the frames you choose, one by one or in a wave that crosses the surface from any object. Grass doesn't jump around a tree that is still small, and layers that don't grow stay out of the way on a frame change.

Pine trees and ferns rise from bare ground in a wave until a forest stands in the low sun
14 — LIVING WIND
One wind for the whole scene

Gusts sweep across the ground in the wind direction. Grass, flowers and shrubs bend, and on library trees only the leaves move while the trunks stand still. It is on by default in every biome and keeps working without the add-on.

Grass and flowers on a hill move in the wind
15 — BIOMES
Twelve worlds to start from

Every biome is a set of ordinary layers. Change the density, swap assets or paint over them. These are Cycles renders of the biomes. Terrains and skies in these images are not part of the add-on.

A grass and wildflower meadow at sunrise, with mist in the valley and dark forest on the far slope
Wildflower Meadow
Ferns, young firs and dead leaves on a forest floor, with tall trunks fading into golden fog
Forest Floor
Boulders and stones on an eroded hillside of rock ledges, fading into a warm haze
Rocky Slope
A sandy desert slope with orange daisies and succulents, quiver trees and boulders behind
Desert Bloom
A brick street in low sun with autumn leaves along the curb and the foot of the walls
Autumn Street
A pine forest with ferns and young trees under tall trunks
Pine Forest
Leafy trees and bushes around a soft clearing of grass, flowers and ferns
Woodland Glade
Dry shrubs and tall grass on open land in low golden light
Dry Savanna
A leaning tree and broad green plants on a sandy shore above calm water
Tropical Shore
Grey moon rocks and pebbles around craters under a black sky
Moon Surface
Reeds and cattails around still water, with trees fading into mist
Wetland
Corals, sponges and sea fans on a sandy reef in blue water
Coral Reef
16 — PERFORMANCE
Fast by default, full detail in the render

Measured on a 1 km by 1 km terrain with the Wildflower Meadow biome, Blender 5.2, Ryzen 7 3700X, RTX 4060. Times are for updating every layer in the viewport.

The viewport budget is typed into the sidebar, the field thins out, and Camera View Only spends the same budget on what the camera sees
Everything, what the render gets
5,030,869 instances, 6.9 s.
Viewport budget 400,000 (default)
332,611 instances, 0.8 s.
Budget and camera view only
312,618 instances, 0.5 s.
17 — BAKE AND SHARE
Your scatter goes where you need it
Save as Biome
Save your layers, and they appear in the biome picker in every file.
Make Real
Turn a layer into a real mesh.
Transforms
Write every instance to CSV or JSON.
Unreal and Unity
Export a folder of FBX meshes, a transforms table and an import script. The scripts are written for Unreal Engine 5.3 and later, Unity 2022.3 LTS and Unity 6, and have not been run inside those engines yet; the FBX files and the table are complete on their own.
Asset Browser
Scatter straight from your own Asset Browser library.
Voyde add-ons
TerrainLab, AtmosLab and Cityform are recognized when you have them. Grounded works the same without them.
18 — PERFECT FOR
Where it fits
◆Landscapes and environments◆Architectural visualization◆Game and film backgrounds◆Street and city dressing◆Product and diorama ground◆Animated scenes with wind◆Seasons and weather changes
19 — INSTALLATION
Up and running in a minute
1Download the zip from your Superhive library. Do not unzip it.
2In Blender open Edit, Preferences, Get Extensions, the menu at the top right, Install from Disk, and pick the zip.
3Open the sidebar in the 3D viewport with N and click the Grounded tab.
4Select your ground, pick a biome and click Add Biome. For your own assets, select them, then the ground last, and click Scatter Selected or Auto Ecosystem.
20 — FAQ
Questions
Do I need Grounded to render my scenes?
No. Every setting lives in Geometry Nodes modifiers and materials saved in your file, so it renders the same on a render farm or another computer, with keyframed seasons and weather too.
Will it slow down my viewport?
The viewport budget caps what the viewport shows (400,000 by default, shared between layers) while renders get everything. Rules that are off cost nothing, and camera culling, thinning and box or point display help on very large scenes.
Which Blender versions are supported?
Blender 5.0 and newer. It is tested on 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2.
Can I use my own assets?
Yes. Select any meshes or collection instances, then the surface, and use Scatter Selected or Auto Ecosystem. One click adds season and weather to their materials.
Does it work with Cycles and EEVEE?
Yes, the result is regular instances that both engines render, and season, snow and wetness work in both.
Can I use the included assets commercially?
Yes. 384 of the 395 models are CC0, from Poly Haven, ambientCG, BlendSwap (license as declared by the uploader) and Smithsonian Open Access. The other 11 are made by Voyde Procedural and ship under the add-on's GPL license. Sources are listed in the add-on's CREDITS file.
Can I make my own biomes?
Yes. Set up layers on a surface, click Save as Biome, and it appears in the biome picker in every file. Copy its two files to share it.
21 — DETAILS
What you get
Included
◆Grounded add-on (Blender extension)
◆12 biomes, 164 assets with 395 models, 384 of them CC0
◆Demo file with one scene per biome
◆Documentation
Compatibility
◆Blender 5.0 or newer
◆Tested on Blender 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2
◆Windows, macOS and Linux
◆Cycles and EEVEE
◆The add-on code is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.
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Details
Blender Extension Compatible Yes
Published about 1 hour ago
Blender Version 5.0 - 5.2
Extension Type Add-on
Render Engine Used Cycles, Eevee
License GPL