This week(s) in Mirage #7

Welcome to anoth­er pro­duc­tive week for Mirage! This time I focused on fix­ing seam­less ter­rains.
Seamless ter­rains have match­ing edges and can be tiled and repeated. 

I had this work­ing a while ago at the noise gen­er­a­tion lev­el. The Perlin func­tion I’m using is peri­od­ic, so it’s pos­si­ble to grab coor­di­nates out­side of the ter­rain and inter­po­late them with the noise in the ter­rain to make it tileable.

This worked just fine ear­ly on. But after port­ing the mod­i­fiers I real­ized there was a lot of post-pro­cess­ing that broke the effect. Adding ero­sion, for instance, changed the whole ter­rain and turned it non-tileable again.

Seamless is a mod­i­fi­er now. It works by tak­ing oppos­ing edges and inter­po­lat­ing between them, then set­ting the result of that inter­po­la­tion as the new edges. Finally, the new edges are blend­ed with the ter­rain over sev­er­al columns or rows. This last step can be con­trolled with the tran­si­tion set­ting. Though I rec­om­mend keep­ing it high so the change looks nat­ur­al. The seam­less effect is applied last so it works with ero­sions, ter­races and every­thing else.

I also hacked on the Map2D datatype some more. Water and Thermal ero­sion are using it now, and you can use it to make maps of any type. I sim­pli­fied parts of the code, fixed a few bugs for non-square maps, added a func­tion to get 1D indices, and added more unit tests. I will be post­ing this code soon!

Next Week

• Work on materials
• Review non-square ter­rains. They are not work­ing with either ero­sion, and have sev­er­al oth­er bugs.
• Keep fix­ing stuff 🙂

If you want a seat in the first row when the next ver­sion of Mirage comes out you can check it out on the BlenderMarket.