Procedural Vase Generator

A Blender add-on that generates procedural vases of revolution — clay, metal, wood and stone — with live preview, separate shape and finish seeds, and a full slider-driven silhouette.

Blender 4.2 or newer · Version 2.2

What it does

You define a 2D silhouette and the add-on spins it around the Z axis. The result is a hollow vase with a real wall thickness, a proper floor, a finished rim and optional handles.

• No Geometry Nodes. Everything is computed in Python and written straight into the object's mesh, so the vase is ordinary geometry — export it, sculpt it, decimate it, retopologise it. No modifier tags along.
• Every vase is its own object and stores its own parameters. Keep a whole shelf in one scene and go back to editing any of them just by selecting it.
• Watertight by construction. No combination of sliders can punch through the wall.

Install

1. Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > ⌄ > Install from Disk
2. Pick clay_vase_generator.zip
3. Make sure it ends up ticked in the list

Manual alternative: copy the folder into Blender's directory and restart. To update, install the zip on top — the add-on keeps the same identifier.clay_vase_generatorscripts/addons

Where it lives

The interface follows Blender's own language. Set Blender to Spanish () and the panel comes out in Spanish; otherwise English. Nothing to configure in the add-on.Preferences > Interface > Translation

Tooltips always stay in English. Blender registers them once when the add-on loads, and refreshing them on the fly would mean re-registering the properties — which wipes the stored data of every vase in the scene

Quick start

The natural order: press New vase or Randomize until something interesting shows up, get closer with Reroll, and only then go into the sliders to fine-tune.

New vase adds another object to the scene. Randomize replaces the design of the vase you already have selected. They're not the same button.

The two seeds

Procedural variation is split in two, each with its own dice button and its own range.

Pin down what matters to you and let the machine roll the rest. Once the silhouette is right, drop the shape range to 0 and keep rolling the finish seed with no risk of losing it.

Behind the shape seed sit ten silhouette archetypes — bulbous, slender, conical, bottle, bowl, hourglass, cylinder, amphora, squat and urn. The seed picks two, blends them, and pushes the result onto your values with the strength of the range. That's why changing the seed changes the character of the vase instead of just nudging it.

Styles

A style is not a material. It's the craft the piece is made with: it changes geometry, not the shader. Materials are chosen separately.

Each style also has its own pool of silhouettes: metal leans towards bottles and long necks, stone towards conical and squat forms. Pressing another style with the same seed gives you a different vase.

Character controls how much the style rules. At 1 the craft imposes its proportions and finish; at 0 it switches off and only your sliders matter. That's the dial for "more ceramic" or "more metal".

Silhouette presets

Presets reconfigure shape, rim, handles and finish in one go. They're independent from the style — the same silhouette reads in any of the four crafts.

Minimal · Organic · Classic · Rustic · Fluted · Bottle

Silhouette controls

Zones run bottom to top: foot → belly → shoulder → neck → lip.

Rim

A rim is rarely a clean cut. Six profiles:

Relief sets the size of that detail, Flare opens or closes the mouth, and Waviness + Lobes ripple the rim into waves like a pinched lip. Waviness works with any of the six profiles.

Surface

Each style's own finish (metal hammering, stone facets, wood grain) adds on top and is dialled with Character.

Handles

Count 0 = none, 1 to 6 spread around the vase.

Plus Thickness, Section (0 round → 1 flat strap), Taper, Reach, Lower/Upper anchor and Rotation.

Mesh

Shade smooth + Angle is the equivalent of auto smooth, solved by marking sharp edges — it leaves no modifier hanging on the object. The panel reports the vertex and face count at the bottom.

Materials

16 procedural materials, grouped by family, independent from the style — put marble on a clay shape if you want. All procedural, no external textures, so the file depends on no images.

Quick recipes

Troubleshooting