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.