Amplify - Virtual Texturing for Unity Pro [Beta 1.2.1]

This product is no longer beta software. We've opened a new thread for the official product release. You can also find more information at the official product page.

Thank you all for taking the time to provide us with valuable feedback during the beta. Cheers.

 

Hi.

This is obviously looking extremely interesting, but could you describe the whole thing in more detail?
I suppose this technology makes it possible to paint all the details in the scene by hand (as done in Rage)?
I am sure not everyone is familiar with what exactly the words SVT mean.

thanks,
Slav

 

very nice - looking forward to the release or even a beta tester

 

Hi Slav,

While this version of the plugin won't support painting, it is planned for a future release.

Very succinctly, SVT or just Virtual Texturing allows you to have a gigantic texture on disk while only a small visible portion exists in video memory. You just keep adding textures worrying less about texture limits and let the system handle the load.

For example, the maximum supported size by this system is 524288 x 524288, or around 2 TB of raw uncompressed data. This data is then heavily compressed to a few GB by the system in order to make it viable. However, by default only two 4096 x 4096 textures are allocated by the VT system to render the scene. Of course, you can manually tweak this value depending on your target platform and let the system balance the budget.

The system will fetch pieces of the larger texture from disk depending on your camera view. Never more than what is actually needed. So, in practice, you'll get more detail using the same amount of texture memory. Plus, you get an automatic, unified texture streaming system.

I usually show this video to people that are trying to understand how it works and what the advantages are:
http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Membres/Sylvain.Lefebvre/texprod/video-hgh-res-2.mp4

 

Looks very interesting. A few questions:

1. Does it work with Unity's real time shadows? In deferred and forward rendered modes?

2. Ball park price for indy developers?

 

1. Does it work with Unity's real time shadows? In deferred and forward rendered modes?

Yes, it integrates nicely with dynamic shadows, light maps, and both rendering modes. However, using VT comes with a small shader performance penalty, so deferred mode is advised.

2. Ball park price for indy developers?

Certainly yes.

 

3. does this work with webplayer?

 

Love it, want it, what orifice do I insert my credit card into.

 

3. does this work with webplayer?

Not at the moment. I'm still trying to get around a few technical limitations preventing it. I see it as an important feature to have in the long run, but I'm focusing on standalone for now.

hans, duke: cheers

 

This looks pretty awesome - add in some splats and 3D paint and we can give id a run for their money

 

Anadin, their system is extremely robust. But hopefully this will be a very decent and cheap alternative.

BTW, these feedback posts in desperate need of votes, would go a long way to help improve this system:
http://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/...hics-texture2d-setpixels-for-compressed-textu
http://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/.../852771-incremental-additive-buildassetbundle

 

Where do I sign up for the beta? where do I pay ...where do I give my first born?

Ok, we were planning on making something like this internally ..now you've gone and saved us the time

 

Reapazor, I'm glad this is of interest to you. I might end up anticipating the beta sign-up, so very soon.

 

We have a few projects that we are working on right now that would greatly benefit from this

 

This looks very interesting, thanks for the explanatory video as well.

I understand it's not it's primary use, but could your implementation in Unity be used also for a 2D game, where you have tons of character animation frames, and have a virtual cache set up to hold only the needed frames in the VRAM? (Usually the character frames are stored in bulk in larger textures (atlases), using UV coordinates change to display only the needed frame on a quad (so basically you have an animated texture). If I get it right, with your setup it would be better to store all the character frames in one single huge texture.)

 

Matthew, will any of them require support for individual textures larger than 16K x 16K? I'm asking this because I've planned support for this for a post-1.0 release, but I could anticipate that if the demand is high. This could be the case for apps based on geographic or urbanistic data.

Andrej, the thing about 3d is that it is somewhat forgiving when it comes to streaming in textures. Sometimes you notice the textures popping in, but due to the depth, page loading order and the way texture filtering works, you rarely do. Plus, this system pulls pages based on what is visible to the camera. A 2d game, on the other hand, will require immediate access to full quality pages, so no progressive loading. The streaming system would have to be a bit different. Not based on what is visible, but probably based on the player's state.

In the future, I could extend it to allow more control over the streaming. I hadn't even considered that possibility, so thanks for pointing out.

 

Hi Diogo

Great work -

Sign me up for Beta.

TAKE MY CREDIT CARD

Does it work with the iPhone?

 

I need this like... YESTERDAY!

If any costs are involved, I'd love to purchase. Where do I sign up?

-TornadoTwins

 

maxfax2009, thanks! Based on the info I have, the only limitation preventing this from running on iPhone 3gs and 4g is the lack of RenderTexture support on Unity for iOS. Unfortunately, that's a deal breaker.

TornadoTwins, I'm doing my best to get this out the door asap. Public beta in January.

 

This would be absolutely brilliant for huge satellite textures mapped on terrain.

 

duke, absolutely. I think a lot of 3d apps using high-res captured data could use something like this, not just games.

 

that then is no problem, RTs work on Unity 3 iOS Pro as far as I can say, at least if we talk about rendering in them, did already work in beta (grabpass might potentially have problems, unsure, didn't check that)

 

dreamora, are Texture.ReadPixels and Graphics.Blit available in Unity iOS Pro? Shaders?

 

Hi. this technique seems quite interesting. As far as it behaves as automatically as the batching it will be perfect.

I use as background a 3gb .mrsid image in my cad app and it runs always at full fps. It Loads-unloads the image in memory as you pan arround an also "loads" differents resolution of the image depending on how close you get to it... I think it is a similar technology.

 

Super exciting. This fits exactly to what I'm working on. Be happy to help out on a Beta~

 

This page/video shows how this all works:

http://linedef.com/personal/

 

Hi Diogo,

Very -VERY- nice work !
+1 Sign me up for Beta.

 

@duke

that video is breathtaking!!! gorgeous stuff. I'm downloading the demo.

Have a look at the professional tab and check for RT vids. The ones that appears forest are awesome!! and they're from 2008!!!

As you said before, this technique would rock for projecting aerial photos over a dem terrain.

 

Now THAT'S how you light billboards!

 

Wow, this really does look awesome. I just hope I can afford it.

 

Hi Diogo

How are you planning to do the painting in future versions?

 

pulov, diese, chad: thanks! I'll keep you guys posted regarding the beta.

bigkahuna: I'm doing my best to ensure that everyone is able to afford it.

maxfax2009: We'll probably start off with some stamping tools, following the id Tech 5 approach.

The scene used in our workflow video had a low level of unique detail (tiling all over). As such, I decided to record a another demo, similar to Brad's, to give you a small sample of the level of scale we are able to achieve using this system:

The virtual texture was set to 32K x 32K and the textures used to build the VT have the following sizes:
- Sponza total: 8192x8192
- Terrain: 16384 x 16384
- Earth: 16384 x 8192
- Moon: 8192 x 4096
- Mars: 4096 x 2048

 

Looks like you're having issues with the shadows. Is that a Unity issue or an issue with your plugin?

 

Oh, I see. So what looks like flickering shadow artifacts are in fact the shadows of the posts overhead?

 

Hi Diogo

Does the detail get really sharp close up, similar to Brad's http://vimeo.com/7481946

 

I think that would be anice reference that in next captures you could include stats windows to see how the texture memory dances depending on the camera position.

maxfax>> I believe that the sharpness of the texture will depend in the base texture itself.

 

bigkahuna, forgot to tweak the shadow distance, my bad. Definitely not a problem with the VT system.

maxfax2009, those were the ones I found using google image search. The texture density depends on the input textures. The VT is automatically resized while textures are being added in order to fit all the textures.

Pulov, I wanted to avoid recording it in high res. The beauty of this system is that it balances the workload based on available texture memory. It tweaks the visual detail to make sure it fits based on how much memory you are willing to allocate to the VT system.

In both videos, in which the default settings were used, around 130 MB allocated for the VT system. But to show you how flexible it can get, here's the same scene using only around 34 MB. These are all uncompressed formats by the way. If Unity supported runtime compressed texture updates, this number could be as low as 10 MB.





I'll update the video tomorrow with fixed shadows, higher resolution and stats.

 

Hi
The fact that you can limit the memory for the system and let it play with this margin is simply great. No rush with the vids, was just a proposal

 

So the other advantage of this is the reduced draw calls, right? I mean, even if I don't want to use epic texture sizes - this system still compiles them to a single sheet.

 

duke, unfortunately not in this case. Maybe in the future, if/when Unity's restrictions preventing it are lifted.

 

@duke; you could consider giving a look to Unilod as it does generate texture atlases of selected objets. Dont remember if it was neccesary to stich meshes during this proces. The bad point is that Unilod is discontinued "officially". If you have coding skills you could mess with the code as it is open source.
Alternativelly if you need to generate texture atlases you could use FlatIron plugin for 3dmax. The same company that creates FlatIron offers a free 3dmax script for texture atlas generation.

 

What are these restrictions?

 

Nice Job! When do you plan to release this Diogo?

 

maxfax2009, not being able to use a custom vertex attribute. That way I could avoid feeding data to the shaders on a per-material basis. However, I do understand why this restriction exists and maybe in the future it won't be that big of an issue.

For now, creating batches is a good way to get around the issue. I'll make sure this is a priority for one of the post-release revisions.

elias_t, cheers! I'm pushing towards an early Q2 2011 release.

 

Oh my wow! I was breaking my head over how to handle large terrains from high viewing altitudes. This comes as a major relief, as I'm nowhere near capable of building such a system myself. Great work! I'll join the others and offers you no less than three of my vital body parts. Or cash, if you prefer. I'd prefer that.

Edit: Big-upped the two feature requests in Feedback, hope it helps.

 

Tinus, thanks. Highly appreciated.

 

I upped the feature requests as well, great work so far!

 

I'd like this as a Christmas present

 

zhx, cheers!

Reapazor,

I've updated the scale video with a new version: HD resolution, visible stats and fixed shadows.