What’s New in Vista 3.1: Rebuilt Multi-Layer Biome Blending, Diagnostic Tool, and Graph Execution Cache

Vista 3.1 improves the core terrain workflow for projects that use multiple biomes. This update rebuilds multi-biome blending, adds Vista Debugger for inspecting the full generation path, and introduces graph execution caching for supported expensive operations.

A Stronger Base for Biome Driven Terrain

Many Vista projects grow beyond a single terrain graph. A real scene may have overlapping biomes, local biome masks, erosion, texture layers, detail density maps, vegetation instances, and multiple terrain tiles all contributing to the final result.

At that point, the terrain may still be procedural, but the editing loop becomes more demanding. You need to know which biome owns a result, how different output types should blend, what happened during generation, and whether you really need to recompute the same expensive work again after a small edit.

Vista 3.1 works on that layer of the tool. It rebuilds the biome blending pipeline, adds a debugger that can inspect generation from graph execution through biome blending to tile population, and caches supported heavy paths such as erosion and Local Procedural Biome execution.

Rebuilt Biome Blending

Multi-biome blending has been rebuilt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McYa82xbVfk

Vista treats different terrain outputs as different kinds of data, instead of pushing everything through one broad blending idea. Height, holes, splat weights, albedo, metallic maps, detail density maps, generic textures, and instance buffers now have blend modes designed around their own use cases.

That shows up quickly in terrain work. Height controls shape. Holes control terrain visibility. Splat weights and albedo affect materials. Detail density maps and instance buffers affect population. A blend rule that works for height is not automatically correct for vegetation or texture data.

Overlapping biomes are easier to reason about when each output category blends according to what the data represents.

Height based blending also accounts for biome world position and Y-scale.

This is useful when local biomes are vertically offset or scaled. Without that context, a height comparison can make sense inside the graph but still produce the wrong ownership decision in the world. Vista 3.1 makes height based blending more aware of where the biome actually sits in the scene.

For projects that rely on placed local biomes, this is one of the more practical improvements in the release. The blend result accounts for where the biome sits in the scene, not just the height values it produced.

Vista Manager now exposes Missing Output policy for Geometry, Textures, and Population.

This solves a common ambiguity in multi-biome setups: what should happen when a biome does not produce a certain output?

Missing output is no longer hidden behind implicit fallback data.

For example, one biome may produce height, texture, and vegetation data, while another only produces height and texture. Missing output can now be handled intentionally. Depending on the policy, Vista can keep the existing tile data or clear that category.

The blend pipeline also treats missing data as a real signal. It no longer has to invent blank fallback textures just to make every channel look populated. The blend stage can report whether data exists, Vista Manager can decide whether to populate, keep, or clear, and the terrain backend can perform the actual clear operation when needed.

Height Win Blend Mode

Vista 3.1 adds Height Win Blend Mode for texture and population output.

When a height map pixel wins through Keep Higher or Keep Lower height blending, this mode lets related texture or population output follow that winner. In other words, the biome that owns the shape at a point can also own the matching surface or population data at that point.

That helps when height ownership should guide more than the terrain surface itself.

Vista Debugger Inspects Generation

Vista Debugger is a new diagnostic system for terrain generation.

It is not limited to graph node execution. Vista Debugger can also record biome blending, and tile population. During that process, it can capture textures, buffers, asset reference names, and variable names.

The final terrain result is often too late in the pipeline to explain a problem by itself. An unexpected result may come from a graph output, a biome mask, a blend decision, a tile population step, an intermediate texture, a buffer, or a variable value captured earlier in generation.

Vista Debugger gives you a way to inspect that trail instead of working backward from the final terrain and guessing.

Debug sessions are stored as portable folders with metadata, textures, and buffers. The editor can open local sessions or import external sessions, and runtime or build captures can be recorded on target devices. That makes the debugger practical for issues that only appear in a specific project, device, seed, or terrain setup.

Graph Execution Cache Reduces Repeated Work

Vista 3.1 adds a graph execution cache to reduce repeated work on supported expensive paths.

Graph nodes can cache their output and skip re-execution when their inputs have not changed. Cache invalidation is backed by a GPU texture comparator, so supported cached paths can detect texture changes accurately.

Initial support includes:

• Erosion.

• Thermal Erosion 2.

• Local Procedural Biome execution.

This helps around expensive graph work such as erosion and thermal erosion. If the input state has not changed, repeating the same simulation slows down iteration without improving the result.

Erosion and Thermal Erosion 2 can also execute immediately from the node editor, which makes the cache more relevant during day to day graph editing.

Smaller Improvements and Fixes

• Viewport preview: Input, Output, Set Variable, and Get Variable nodes can show texture or buffer data in graph editor viewport panels.

• Cleaner wiring: Generic Output nodes, data channel output nodes, and Set Variable now support data passthrough.

• Graph authoring: Append accepts more than two input slots, and Weight Blend now defaults to four input slots.

• Biome masks: the processed biome mask is now passed into graph editor and terrain graph execution.

• Polaris integration: Detail Template now exposes Grass Shape for texture based grass.

• Terrain layer prototyping: the new solid color tool can create simple diffuse textures while you block out terrain layers.

• Cleared canvas and render textures reduce stale data leaking into later biome blending, erosion, and terrain tile passes.

• Render texture readback now preserves the previous active render texture across Unity Terrain and Polaris Terrain.

• Fixes also cover graph editing, shared graph saving, spline region output, OpenSimplex large seeds, Hemisphere shape output, Vector overrides, and pivot centralization.

Available for Personal, Indie, and Pro

Vista 3.1 is available for Personal, Indie, and Pro.

If you use Vista Personal, the core improvements in this release still apply to you. The biome blending rewrite, Vista Debugger, and supported graph execution caching improve the base Vista workflow.

The paid editions become relevant when your project grows beyond Personal's production limits. Consider Indie when you need higher output resolution and the expanded paid workflow. Consider Pro when you also need Pro-only workflows such as splines, real world data, or the extended Expose Property workflow.