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allegorithmic in Unity 3.4 -Video

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by KarelA, Apr 19, 2011.

  1. KarelA

    KarelA

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  2. RichBosworth

    RichBosworth

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    Very nice!
     
  3. ippdev

    ippdev

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    Delicious!

    BTH
     
  4. 3KyNoX

    3KyNoX

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    Cool things, was waiting this :)
     
  5. simone007

    simone007

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    really great
     
  6. AJMilsom

    AJMilsom

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    looks awesome,
     
  7. Thomas-Pasieka

    Thomas-Pasieka

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  8. WinningGuy

    WinningGuy

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    Wow. That is awesome.
     
  9. HarvesteR

    HarvesteR

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    Awesome!! just awesome!!

    This is gonna be perfect for my procedural terrain thingy!!

    Any word on a release date?

    Cheers
     
  10. the_motionblur

    the_motionblur

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    @HarversteR: Keep in mind that you'll still need to buy any substance separately or the Software Substance Designer so that you can create your own substances for unity.
     
  11. bigkahuna

    bigkahuna

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    Huh? So this new technology is only usable if you buy additional content or an additional editing tool? That kind of sucks.
     
  12. RichBosworth

    RichBosworth

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    I believe it's at a reduced price though????
     
  13. Gub

    Gub

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    Cool! Hopefully some version of this will come with the indie version.
     
  14. HarvesteR

    HarvesteR

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    Oh, that kinda sucks... I thought they had fully integrated B2M into unity... not just added support for the end product of the software..

    Oh well... it's still quite cool... About having to buy external software... we pretty much expect to don't we? What good is Unity without some kind of 3D modelling program, or an image editor?

    It's a cool asset format in any case!! Definitely worth checking out!

    Cheers
     
  15. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    This is awesome but why adding such tool into Unity when we cannot create anything with?
    I really hope substance designer comes with, otherwise it's just a waste of time, i won't use it neither buy any substance.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2011
  16. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Additional software to buy does not make that much sense as UT in the past forcefully refused to integrate even free technology with external tools (PhysX APEX or FMODs Designer for example) over having it all in editor, so if thats now going to change, especially after hinting it out as "being free for all licensees", for a case where the tool required to create anything at all where it is externally and not even free unlike the other cases where it was refused, it will pretty surely not lead to understanding and acceptance just like this. the fact that you can buy packages with presetup one reduces it as a problem a bit, but would at least from my end be greeted with major head shaking cause dev time was wasted on it when the OC bug is not fixed, OC calculation does not even use 1 computer to its max, beast multi computer rendering is missing, beast light cloud is missing, the for 3.0 announced 2d system is missing, Unity GUI still is lacking multitouch support on mobile 2.x years after launch etc, basically if there is a long list of "common interest" technology not implemented due to lack of dev time but something of use to a few dozen to a few hundred users, which was not easy to add (otherwise it were there in 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3).

    But I'm open to see what is really going to happen, its not worth going angry or on riot or anything alike until we know what it really will be :)
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2011
  17. tarragon

    tarragon

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    How about something that you can't do any other way? Like fixing bugs, making unity fully multithreaded or u64? THAT would be awesome. This is just hightech gadget, nothing groundbreaking. Or better yet, do proper documentation. That would be super awesome.
     
  18. Demostenes

    Demostenes

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    Nice, but this can be done with many external tools (without that last part, generating at runtime). I would prefere fixing bugs, like crashing umbra, 64 bit support, multicore support.... This is what is really needed. This is not, because it can be achieved easily with existing tools.
     
  19. antenna-tree

    antenna-tree

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    Allegorithmic integration has a lot to do with detailed, hi-res textures at very small file sizes. This can't be done with external tools.
     
  20. tarragon

    tarragon

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    Dremora, i admire your swiss reserved tact. And aggree with you.
     
  21. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Demostenes: no its completely impossible to do, cause these material properties can be changed at runtime and the texture will just change (at least if fully implemented). These "textures" are not stored as bitmap anywhere, they get generated at runtime through the parameters and updated by it. This results in 1024x1024+ textures with a few bytes to kbs in size which the webplayer will just love (thats what it was originally invented for btw, for download games to work against the GB primarily wasted by 6 versions of the same texture in different sizes and hw compressions)

    Gamebryo has a very sweet video on it showing its power in action with something rusting in rain for example.
     
  22. Demostenes

    Demostenes

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    I know, I was commenting THIS video. And this is just fancy normal map generation, AFAIK no procedural texture generation. Anyway I would still prefere fixing old problems, instead of wasting time by adding new fancy a not really needed features.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2011
  23. Demostenes

    Demostenes

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    This is full implementation? So even diffuse is procedural? Or only normal and other maps?
     
  24. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

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    Got a video of that? Nobody is linking it and youtube says no to gamebryo Allegorithmic.
     
  25. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

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    BTW, all this "zomg huge res textures at tiny file size" this applies to the actual size within VRAM right? Or just stored size. Otherwise it's not what I'd consider impressive, or very useful in a world of ever increasing hard drive space (and you can't throw cell phones at me cause those are catching up fast).
     
  26. antenna-tree

    antenna-tree

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    This is the stored file size, they are rasterized at runtime. The benefits are for web players and any other platform where file size is a concern... I think a few of those still exist ;-)
     
  27. Unified

    Unified

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    It's nice. Like Antenna says, it's not just about the ability to create a texture, but rather it's the reduction in distributable sizes that matters the most. Normal maps take up tons of space and so generating them at runtime is a huge benefit.
     
  28. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Especially if you don't license Unity Cache addon license where the 50mb limit is of importance or if you want to offer the game on casual portals where 700mb installers are not seen that often and normally also not that overly successful
     
  29. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

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    How long does this rasterization process take for an average material? I'd be worried about many replacing slow downloads with slow rasterization wait times when they bump up the number of textures cause of the smaller size.

    Oh well, so long as we get lightprobes in 3.4 too, then this pill will be much easier to swallow. ;)




    I'm sorry, I'm trying really hard to be positive and appreciate the work you guys must have done to put this in Unity, but the more I've used Substance Designer, the less impressed I am with it compared to the usefulness of lightprobes, and very worried at this point lightprobes have been put to one side in favor of this. :(
     
  30. antenna-tree

    antenna-tree

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    Yeah, it's a fair point that some time is still eaten up baking the textures, but as you can see they are able update in realtime so the bakes are pretty fast.

    Allegorithmic integration has been in the works for quite some time. Light probes will most likely have to "marinate" a bit longer. But the two projects are in parallel so neither one is holding up the other. We do have more than one programmer over here ;-)
     
  31. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

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    This makes me very sad, too sad to even respond to your cheeky comment :(
     
  32. sybixsus2

    sybixsus2

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    Yes, this.
     
  33. brn

    brn

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    If this tool works anywhere near as good as it appears to its going to make generating textures much easier from an art point of view. Its not an easy task to create good tiling textures, and when I say this I mean properly balanced for tone, pattern and color. Ive just down loaded the demo tool from their website. I hope its as good as it looks. Oh and by the way did you guys notice how well balanced the lighting was in the youtube Vid link. Either they have put a really good artist on it or something has been tweaked unity engine side as well.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2011
  34. Demostenes

    Demostenes

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    Well, in almost all cases demo is ideal case. I ve seen many wonderfull demos and reallity was little bit disappointing.
     
  35. brn

    brn

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    Well after playing with the trail software, from my point of view its very impressive stuff. What ever it ends up costing or not costing it will pay itself off in a few days of usage for me. I had been playing with some hybrid procedural bitmap stuff a little while back, these new tools make my experiments seem stone aged :) . Any way heres the pic of my old stuff and heres to moving on to better!

    $Splat.jpg
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2011
  36. bigkahuna

    bigkahuna

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    @brn - That looks like a very cool shader. Makes my stuff look stone-aged. ;)
     
  37. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

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    Stop putting your own stuff down dude, and release it to the masses, pwease! :D
     
  38. thellama

    thellama

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    I think it looks pretty cool over all. But it seems from the demo videos that you can just purchase a few different styles (their going to be selling packages) and change the textures to make hundreds of different edible textures for your games with all the editable goodies. You don't need the software it seems to use them in the engine, only to create your own unique ones material.

    I can understand people arguing for bug fixes and multi-cores and 64x I want all of those too! But for the people complaining about needing to purchase the software I find your behavior irrational. It's like seeing Unity added Modo501 .lxo file support but didn't include a copy of Modo for it's users.

    I can't say it will be awesome or lame without trying it, but it seems like time saver and like I said, seems like you don't need the software to get it working, just buy a few packs, support the developer and add your own textures. Done.
     
  39. linusnorden

    linusnorden

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    I agree :)!

     
  40. stimarco

    stimarco

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    I'm clearly biased (you'll find out why in a second), so make of this blatant bit of sucking-up to get more work what you will, but...

    I think even Allegorithmic will admit that there will undoubtedly be some artists who will hate Substances and won't be able to make the transition to creating textures using the Substance Designer tool. It does help if you've had some experience with scripting or some other form of programming: you have the concepts of data flow, cause and effect, logical operations, and so on.

    At first, I thought those artists would be in the majority and Allegorithmic would have a lot of trouble getting traction, but I don't think there are really all that many artists around today who have no experience at all with basic scripting concepts. All of the major modelling tools support some form of scripting.

    When I was hired by Allegorithmic to write the Substance Designer docs last year, I was worried I'd have no end of trouble building anything at all with their software; it's a world away from the likes of Photoshop and Painter and, on first glance, a complex Substance graph can look like a steaming bowl of "spaghetti ai rettangoli colorati"[*]. But it only took a short while for everything to 'click'.

    I wonder if we'll see programmers switching to the Dark Side of development and specialising in "Texture Programming".


    [*] ("Spaghetti with coloured rectangles". Goes very well with grated Pecorino cheese.)