Mirage 3.7 is out now

It’s been a while, has­n’t it? Life has been real­ly, real­ly hec­tic. But there’s always some time to work on Mirage! This new ver­sion comes with a com­plete revamp of the dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem, now using Geometry Nodes. Also M1 macs are sup­port­ed now.

The first thing you will notice is that changes are applied inmedi­ate­ly. Vertex groups or par­ti­cles aren’t used any­more, so there’s no need to have an “apply” but­ton to regen­er­ate them any­more. You can start see­ing changes as soon as you set a Collection or a proxy collection.

The next thing is that every­thing is now orga­nized using sub­pan­els. This is more scal­able than the old 3 tabs, and you can see as many or as few options as you want. 

Density is now man­aged by the min­i­mum and max­i­mum dis­tance between objects. Increasing the min­i­mum dis­tance, makes the far­ther apart and thus less objects can fit in the ter­rain. On the oth­er hand, low­er­ing the min­i­mum dis­tance allows more objects to fit. Maximum dis­tance works the same way but opposite.

There’s also a den­si­ty fac­tor to increase the den­si­ty when using lim­ites (like noise, XY Coordinates, etc). You can now use noise to lim­it where objects show up. This can be used to sim­u­late small for­est or clumps of rocks.

Another new fea­ture is that lim­it by height, noise and image map sup­port col­or ramps for more control.

Since set­tings now update in real­time, cam­era opti­mized lay­ers can now be used in ani­ma­tions too. Camera set­tings also have two new set­tings to con­trol the width and height of the frus­tum (the pro­jec­tion of the cam­era view). Increasing this set­ting shows more objects out­side of the cam­era view for reflec­tions and shadows.

Proxy col­lec­tion is a new fea­ture that you can see in action in the video above. The proxy col­lec­tion will only be vis­i­ble in the view­port, replac­ing the main col­lec­tion. You can use them to have a low poly col­lec­tion in the view­port for bet­ter per­for­mance, and then have the ful­ly detailed mesh­es in the final render.

Finally since every­thing is done with Geo nodes you can always drop into the nodes edi­tor to change the dis­tri­b­u­tion in any way you like.

Getting it

If you have already bought Mirage, con­grats! You can down­load the update for free. If you want to buy Mirage you can find it over at Gumroad or the Blendermarket.

To down­load from the Blender Market log in, then click on your user­name at the top. Select “Orders”, then look for Mirage and click “Downloads”. For Gumroad just login, go to your library and find Mirage. You can also find both the sta­ble and beta there.