The time has finally come. Mirage 3.4 is out today! The highlight of this release is the new terrain engine. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? This has probably been the longest time between releases, but there’s a good reason for the delay! Mirage 3.4 comes with a new terrain engine completely rewritten in Rust for top-performance. I’ve codenamed
It’s release time! Render+ 2.1 is now out. This version comes with several small quality of life improvements. I’m trying to smaller, more frequent releases moving forward. This way you can get bug fixes and small improvements faster instead of waiting until I implement some big feature. Let’s look at the changes in this version Debug messages
In this super quick tip we’ll see how to calculate the distance between two points. The formula for Euclidean distance in 3D is the following: There’s at least three ways to do this in Blender. The classic way The benefit of this snippet is that it will always be available. It doesn’t depend on a specific
Fractal noise is a well-known effect in After Effects. Probably one of the most used too, it’s versatile enough to create all kinds of effects. Users coming to Blender from an After Effects background might be wondering if there’s a similar effect or at least some way to animate noise. Let’s see how we can replicate it
I recently reworked Mirage’s live mode to be more efficient. One of the things I wanted to improve was detecting changes in terrain settings. I figured the best way to do it was getting a dictionary of the settings and finding what changed in it. So I wrote a little function to get all the properties inside a PropertyGroup as a dictionary. I figure
It’s been a while! I’ve finally finished the new materials. The new materials now use image textures instead of procedurals. While procedurals have many benefits, you get more bang for your buck with images. They bring lots of non-discrete details and variation, along with better performance in exchange for some flexibility. This change was possible now
In your journey through the world of CGI, you have probably come across the word non-manifold once or twice. Maybe you got slapped with a “mesh is non-manifold” error too and wondered how your mesh became non-something. Surely having a manifold mesh is better. But what does it mean to be manifold? A manifold is a mathematical
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
Whoa, how long has it been? Wasn’t I supposed to do this every week? These last few weeks have been crazy with work, life, the release of Blender 2.80, Mirage 3.2 and Render+ 2. But that’s all done now. Time to get back on the horse! The good news is that I still managed to put some
After a long time Render+ 2 is finally out. I started working on this version on September last year, and went into beta around January until now. But the planning for these changes goes back years. I’m really happy with this release, the code base and the whole system have taken a leap forward in quality. These changes pave
New Blender, new Mirage. Or so I’d like to say. This is boring release actually. The only news is compatibility with Blender 2.80. Note that from this point onward, Mirage will require at least Blender 2.80. All the new features I’ve been blogging about will come in the next version: 3.4. Join the mailing list
Blender 2.80 is out today after almost a year and a half in development. Time to celebrate! This is one of the largest and most important releases of Blender. As big as 2.5 back in the day. So, what’s the big deal? Don’t be fooled by the version number. 2.80 isn’t just 0.01 better than 2.79, it’s 100x times