Mirage 3.1 launched

Keeping up with the pre­vi­ous deci­sion to make small­er, more fre­quent releas­es here’s Mirage 3.1.

What’s new

• New Invert fea­ture: Inverts the ter­rain, pret­ty use­ful for cre­at­ing under­wa­ter, deep canyon terrains.
  
• New Blocks fea­ture: Creates a vox­el-like effect in the ter­rain. Useful if you’re mak­ing minecraft-ish scenes, or games (and you don’t want to both­er writ­ing a vox­el engine).
  
• Fluvial Erosion (AKA Hydraulic Erosion): Everyone’s favorite ero­sion is in! This was slat­ed for 3.0 but I ran into sev­er­al issues with the imple­men­ta­tion (par­tic­u­lar­ly in the per­for­mance). This time I based the code on Michel Anders’ ero­sion algo­rithm (based on this paper).
  
• Better val­ue range for Alpine. Values for the alpine set­ting were a lit­tle wonky, some­times 2 gave the same result as 0 and 10 was always too extreme to be use­ful. The new range cor­rects these issues.
• Several bug fixes

As usu­al you can check the full changel­og is avail­able in the docs.

Next Version(s)

3.2

• Rename “Features” with “Modifiers”. The orig­i­nal idea for fea­tures was that they would relate to par­tic­u­lar terrain/rock fea­tures, with Blocks and invert this is obvi­ous­ly no longer the case. Modifiers rep­re­sents them bet­ter and fits in with Blender lingo.
• Merge the Slopes mod­i­fi­er and smooth edges option. The new mod­i­fi­er would be just called “Smooth”. Add set­tings to smooth from the cen­ter or the sides, smooth­ing with the same val­ue on both X/Y (center/sides) or a dif­fer­ent val­ue per axis (sides).
• Move the “Island” edge set­ting to its own mod­i­fi­er. Add a prop­er Cycles mate­r­i­al to the ocean mesh, along with set­tings to con­trol the calm­ness and col­or of the water.
  
• Move “Straight edges” to its own mod­i­fi­er called “Diorama”. Rewrite the mod­i­fi­er from scratch, the cur­rent method sucks and requires too much man­u­al fix­ing. Make the dio­ra­ma box a sep­a­rate mesh with good geom­e­try and keep it par­ent­ed to the ter­rain. Make it UV unwrapped and include a basic (sam­ple) mate­r­i­al. Also add a but­ton to update the dio­ra­ma box when the ter­rain is changed (haven’t found a way to do this auto­mat­i­cal­ly yet).
• Add dif­fer­ent falloff options for both island and smooth mod­i­fiers (still have to do some research on this!).
• Add a basic sam­ple Cycles mate­r­i­al to ter­rains based on the prin­ci­pled shad­er. This would include mix­ing the ver­tex col­ors to cre­ate dif­fer­ent masks, and snow/dirt.

3.3

Initial port of the ter­rain engine to Rust. Well, either a port or a new engine :). I will be writ­ing more about this in time, mov­ing to rust opens lots of excit­ing possibilities!