Amplify - Virtual Texturing for Unity Pro [Beta 1.2.1]

jamexist, Tinus, cheers! Might take a bit of hacking but I'll get the terrain working.

Pulov, feel free to use full 64K x 64K. Both creation+build time and runtime performance should be fairly VT size independent. BTW, because Amplify does it's own jpeg compression you'll get better quality by using a uncompressed texture instead.

 

I've the possibility to convert it to BMP and to Tiff. Dunno if Unity supports Tiff.

I can also test it with 150k x150k sized images. I'll coment.

 

Current beta is limited to 64K x 64K. I'll upload a unrestricted version later today.

 

Hi

I might be doing something wrong....

Amplify installs correctly and I can see the new available materials but the problem is with the monstersized texture.

I can`t import it. WHen I do drag&drop it unity crashes. When I do manually copy in the project directory the file appears in teh project tree but does not work since even if it is identified as a texture, when draggin to teh texture slot in teh amplify material a prohibition sign appears...

I'll try with smaller texture, just wanted to comment this issue to see if other are facing same problems.

 

Unfortunately, you won't be able to use such a big texture at the moment. Unity itself can't import textures larger than ~16K x 16K. For now, you'll have to split those somehow. Support for these giant textures is planned but it'll have to wait until after the release.

Where and how do you get your data? Are you are using actual satellite textures?

 

About the data.

These is a mosaic built from aerial flight. The photos are taken during a relatibely low altitude flight and then tiles are rectified and merged into a unique masasive size photo. The detail of this image is shocking, so is its size wich hI believe is about the GB.

I use this stuff in Microstation wich is able to load the image in a georeferenced maner. It also loads it using tiles so only what is in view is loaded, also, the resolution of the image depends on the active zoom.

You cant get this image online, I had to move to local concil's cartography department to get a copy in a DVD. If interested on this data Dropbox is a nice way to share large stuff. but dunno if the image will fit the free versions data limit.
___________________________________________

Unity loads tiff images!!, I loaded a 15k tiff.
____________________________________________

I'm unable to make it work, I'll try to search for a tut in th threat.

I do create a amterial

Select amplify--->difuse

add the 15 texture

in scene preview mode is no longer previewed, a gray plane is shown

and also in game mode a gray plane is shown.

_____________________________________________________________________________

And even if not ask...

I'm looking at amplify because I'm modeling a LARGE model of a city wih involves in its outskirts montain environments that I believe will look much better with aerial ortos draped onto them + vegetation than a tiled gras texture.

 

It would really help to get my hands on such large data so I can figure out a way to import it, bypassing Unity. Can you link me to the data?

Did Amplify throw any errors? It's possible that Amplify failed to load the TIFF. You can check if there was an error thrown by searching for a file named "amperr.log" on your project's Assets folder. If this is indeed the problem, I'll debug/fix right away it if you provide me the file.

Sounds like a fine use of the plugin. I'll do my best to get this working as soon as possible.

 

No rush for me, I'm still finishing the pavement stuff and roadmarkins. I've more than one year of developement ...

It did not work either with the jpgs, but I'll try reinstalling my unity as many times get silly errors.


As said have no link for this data.

The image is 1,32gb.

If you find a method for transferring such big file in a not messy way I'll hapily send you. Its public data of the local council so no problems on sharing it.

BUT. The good news for you are

That I checked for an .ecw image on the ned with large detail and found an enormous dataset wich seems that will be good enough for your testings.

Download the Free ER VIEWER 7
file--->open file or URL
and paste one of these.

ecwp://195.235.91.52/ortofotos/473001.ecw

ecwp://195.235.91.52/ortofotos/013001.ecw

ecwp://195.235.91.52/ortofotos/283001.ecw (Madrid)

ecwp://195.235.91.52/ortofotos/073101.ecw

more ecw links (many only in BW)
http://usuarios.multimania.es/librodefaros/descargas/0cartografia_sigpac.htm#PROVECWP

pretty sure that there are lots of them along the internet.

Dont know if when "streaming" this files when doing a Save As it will save its maximun resolution ot only the one you're viewing.

 

Thanks for the info. I'll take it for a spin as soon as I get some free time.

 

Bump for a small update. You may grab the newest build in the frontpage.

Improvements

• Lifted VT size restrictions for the Beta. Max is now 524288 x 524288.
• Eliminated all serious GC spikes by reusing more resources.
• Exposed PagesPerFrame property in AmplifyRuntime. This value controls the number of pages that can be sent to the GPU per-frame. It may be used to trade FPS for faster streaming.

Bugs Killed

• Fixed more unnecessary rebuilds.
• Reduced runtime overhead slightly.

 

Hey, I have a suggestion, I know you haven't finished this yet buy my Suggestion is Mesh Streaming.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=58139
That's a thread someone made which i just happened to of found and it explained what Mesh Streaming was, well the simplist way.

So I'm wondering if Milo And Kate uses this too?
http://www.computerandvideogames.co...e-how-milo-kate-handles-billions-of-polygons/
I was amazed by the amount of polygons, also here is a more indepth look at how it works.

http://miciwan.com/GDC2011/GDC2011_Mega_Meshes.pdf

Thanks for reading!

 

I'm looking forward to implementing some sort of mesh streaming in the future.

I'm not sure I can pull off that specific implementation without hardware tessellation. Once Unity supports it it'll be extremely easy to extend Amplify to add displacement.

 

This looks very cool and very useful - it looks like it should play nice with the substance materials - will it?

Also, you said after v1.0 you will look at other platforms - will you be able to look at consoles?

 

As long as those substance materials are not virtualized it should work fine, side by side.

Unfortunately we don't have the monetary resources to go into consoles right now. However, we do have the necessary experience to pull it off if/when that time comes. Assuming that Unity plays nicer with texture upload bandwidth on the consoles, that is.

 

has anyone gotten this working on iOS or android?

 

I doubt it'll work in it's current state. It uses a couple of native modules that need recompilation for iOS.

 

Hi Diogo,

Just wanted to point out that the latest Beta works pretty nice. I´ve created a simple showcase involving six textures up to 16kx12k and it worked pretty well. I only experience a few hickups in the beginning (the first 5-10 sec) of the standalone build. Great work!

In one of your older demo videos you used Amplify for heightmaps. Could you please briefly sketch how you achieved that? Did you combine Amplify with Unity Terrain?

xad

PS: One minor thing: When I cancel the texture import into the atlas usually all Amplify textures become black in the scene. It would be nice if Amplify could then just fallback to the lowres textures instead...

 

I remember getting those stutters in standalone builds too, no so long ago, but the profiler wasn't signaling any problems in Amplify calls. The first 1-2 frames or so were still a bit heavy because I need to ensure that some initial pages are indeed loaded; after that it's pretty much stable. Since it didn't seem to be a problem on my part, I tried enabling the startup resolution dialog to let the engine warm up a bit. It did the trick for me. Let me know if that works for you.

Heightmaps? Do you mean in the scale demo? Those verts were displaced offline. There is currently no heightmap support, but it could be quickly added in the future. I still have 2 free channels left to fill before requiring more bandwidth, height could easily be one of them.

You're totally right about the black textures and weird artifacts. I saved that work for last and the next revision will fix nearly all of those issues and hopefully it'll be a more polished experience. However, Instead of switching back to the low res textures, which is much harder to accomplish, I'm using a pleasant default texture. Works for material dragging too. I'm mostly fixing and polishing usability right now.

Also, as quick note there's currently a bug in the normal maps, X and Y are switched and that results in completely wrong lighting. It's already fixed and will ship on the next revision.

Thanks for the feedback! Highly appreciated.

 

The stutter might likely come from the initial texture RAM to VRAM upload halt in Unity which is causing the stuttering startup in any game with heavier texture usage before they use the "standard since DX7" way to overcome it.
For regular textures at least the way to solve this is showing objects with the textures on them behind the loading screen before the interactivity starts.

Otherwise the current version is a rather pleasant and supportive piece of technology

 

I was testing a Sponza scene with 19 virtualized materials. All textures are resized to 64x64 (compressed) after their materials are converted to Amplify. That makes a grand total of 102 KB. I don't think this was causing the stutter in my case :\

 

That sounds great although I doubt it would be easy to connect Amplify with the Unity terrain system which I feel is very important for efficient (geometry) paging.

Glad to hear that.

xad

 

My thoughts exactly. It could be used for parallax occlusion instead.

 

Bump for another update. You may grab the newest build on the frontpage.

Improvements

• Added support for dynamically instantiated prefabs.
• Updated shaders to point to placeholder by default.
• Added placeholder textures to replace weird visual artifacts. Works with dragging too.

Bugs Killed

• Fixed all materials going black or weird during incremental rebuild and when an assigned AmplifyTexture was deleted.
• Fixed incremental rebuilds being triggered when the user was just dragging materials around.
• Fixed a bug causing rebuild without collect after a cancel.
• Fixed asking for a new build location when it was already defined.
• Fixed swapped normal channels.

Known Issues

• Physical cache gets corrupted sometimes. To fix this, just disable / re-enable AmplifyManager.
• Scene view stutters in a scene with a couple thousand objects.
• Warning "[Amplify] Failed to load PlaceholderDiffuse.tga" is shown sometimes.

These will be fixed in the next update.

 

For any wondering how to convert their own shaders to support Amplify, I've uploaded an example package showing how to adapt Unity's normal "Bump Specular" shader.

 

Any news on the terrain support? I could use this on my current project. Really looking forward to your first release.

 

This is really interesting

 

Failspin, we've locked down the features right now due to the upcoming release. Having said that, we'll be looking into it soon after that.

 

Hey, Just a quick question

Just saw this and just had to ask this

Is this a advanced LOD System for Textures?

 

Not only an advanced LOD system. It is also an advanced streaming solution. As an example, our tech demo will feature over 6 GB of textures in a small scene where nearly all the textures are visible at the same time. It will feature unique detail up to 5 pixel per cm, without resorting to tiling/repetition. And absolutely *no loading times*. It probably wouldn't run on any modern system; however, using Amplify it'll run on any shader model 3.0 card with at least 128 MB of VRAM.

Of course, instead of concentrating all the detail in the same area, you could texture an entire city at a lower resolution, filling up to 256 gigatexels corresponding to 1.5 gb of raw data which is internally compressed down to a fairly manageable 100 gb. The system will balance accordingly.

The only feature missing to make it a full fledged texture LOD system is anisotropic filtering which we plan to add post launch.

 

this looks really interesting!

Im building a few levels that do not use terrain, so I am completely interested in this.

Im building maps that are quite polygon heavy - so im wondering how the draw calls are working? In the megatexture if I have a diffuse texture, a spec map and a normal map all side by side in the megatexture do I still get hit 3 times as if the textures were brought in separately? Can I even have these different style maps side by side in one texture? can the shader see specific blocks of the virtual texture as different map types? spec/normal ect? or do you then need multiple virtual textures?

im not entirely clear on exactly how the UV's correlate to the mega texture... do I need to flatten mapping and bake out unique UV sets for each model if I have used tiling? If I have tiling environment textures that have UVs scaled outside of the 0-1 space, can I somehow set up a situation where my model only sees one block of the megatexture and repeats that block as if its a single texture? Thus allowing my UVs to be scaled outside the 0-1 block and then tiling would occur or is VT meant to eliminate the need to do that in the first place?

is there a manual explaining some of the implementation of the megatexture? How do I even create the thing?

sorry if these are obvious - i tried to scan the thread and didnt really see the answers....I assume people already know this... i only know classic style asset creation.

 

microneezia, I'll try to answer everything:

The number of draw calls on your materials doesn't change. You still get at least one per-unique material. Amplify adds a few draw calls to off-screen surfaces; most are scene independent and not fill-rate limited. Generally speaking, the same rules apply.

Diffuse+gloss and normal textures are treated as different layers of one big virtual texture. These are the only maps supported for virtualization at the moment but more will be added in the future. However, these are details that you don't need to worry about. Everything you do need to care about is listed in the docs as recommendations and limitations.

You set up your UVs the same way as you did before. So, yes, tiling is supported and the plugin will display your surfaces even if they are tiled beyond 0-1. All the packing and management is done by Amplify so you don't have to. This plugin does not change the mesh UVs, it simply transforms them in the shader.

> is there a manual explaining some of the implementation of the megatexture? How do I even create the thing?

There's no manual because Amplify takes care of everything, while you're editing your scene. You can see how this is accomplished by checking out our workflow video. It is a bit dated but still represents how the system works. We tried do do this in a way that you are actually using Virtual Texturing without making changes to your scene editing workflow.

tl;dr your regular texturing workflow doesn't have to change, amplify does everything for you.

---

If you wish to know more about how Amplify works internally, you might want to check the following references:
http://silverspaceship.com/src/svt/
https://mollyrocket.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=21

 

thank you very much for taking the time to go through my wall 'o' text, it means a lot! that video was really great, sorry I missed it... Im subscribed and watching this very closely now. I will definitely start trying this on my levels in a conservative way to see if I can get the great results its capable of.

Hard to commit headlong into implementing it though (even though its super simple) without knowing what the pricing will be for commercial products, have you released any information in that regard?

thanks for all your work here, its really amazing! im ecstatic I found this thread!

 

No problem! I'm sure other people could be asking the same questions and really wanted to assure everyone that the purpose of this plugin is to make VT as easy as possible while integrating nicely with Unity.

We are getting very close to launch, couple of weeks tops, and pricing will be made public very soon. The only reason we're holding off on it is that we're still figuring out payment and distribution options.

 

Had another question, - because Amplify is and works through a shader, I assume you cannot use custom shader networks and still receive benefits from Amplify...

1. If I want to use a different shader for a model in my game, like a boss character or something, I assume there is no problem putting that next to the amplify shaded models, no sorting issues ect with alpha or some other problem my noob brain cant contrive in my head ?

2. is there any hope that we can add or customize the Amplify shader in the future to add things like fresnel, multiply, or any of the other shader customizations that are available in unity?

thanks again

 

Yes, you can use custom shaders. You're free to adapt your own shaders to Amplify, a few days ago we released a surface shader conversion example pack.

The only thing to keep in mind is that Amplify does not support Semi-opaque/Alpha materials. However, it does support Cutout/Alpha-Test. Semi-opaque materials will have to use Unity's regular texturing system instead. For example, your character could use a Amplify material for the whole body (including head) but not for the hair. The hair would need a separate, non-Amplify, material.

 

0.0 }wow

you have an amazing piece of work here sir; I have to say, and without knowing costs, and only casually knowing what it can do and how to implement it....

im sold.

gradients be dammed

 

Sorry if this has been covered before, too many pages of posts to wade through... It seems Amplify shaders don't respect the Lightmapping Light setting. When I switch a light to be bakedOnly, it still likes up the shaders as if it was set to realtime.

Can this be looked into please as removing the ability to have bake specific lights is a real issue for us.

 

microneezia, cheers. I'm sure you will find it affordable. The price for the indie version will be within the range of other Unity extensions.

Seon, it certainly wasn't intentional as we ported the shaders directly with the intent of preserving their features. I'll have a look at it today.

 

Seon, I've just tested lightmaps with a few combinations of baked-only / realtime-only / auto, and it seems to be working fine on both Windows and OS-X using Unity 3.3.0f4.

Some questions:
- Are you using forward or deferred rendering path?
- What kind of hardware are you running on?

Also, something to consider:
Vertex lighting is not supported at the moment. Possible solutions include using deferred lighting or setting your lights to per-pixel.

 

Bump for the *final beta* update. As usual, you may grab this final build on the frontpage.

Improvements

• Added target camera field to AmplifyManager. Adds and AmplifyRuntime to your camera automatically.
• Added an automatic layer assignment tool for Amplified objects. In the Amplify/Tools menu, replaces Amplify/Converter specific window with a multi-tool window.
• Added more usage cases for Placeholder textures, finalizing editing polishing work.
• Raised default editor cache size to 128 MB.

Bugs Killed

• Fixed occasional physical VT cache corruption.
• Fixed editor stutter in scenes with thousands of objects.
• Fixed "failed to load PlaceholderDiffuse/Normal.tga".
• Fixed uncompressed vt size computation, also fixing compression ratio.
• Fixed pre-pass camera not sharing the same parent as reference camera.
• Fixed incorrect page file signature mismatch causing unnecessary rebuilds.
• Fixed non-deterministic sorting when packing textures ensuring same packing for full rebuilds across different machines.
• Fixed amperr.dump being generated when user cancels an incremental build.
• Fixed texture collection issues when switching scenes.

 

I cant get 1.2.3 working. I have both installed it over existing 1.2.2 and also installed it from scratch.

Whenever I build an Amplify Texture and try adding it to my AmplifyManager script, it turns off the Script and shows the following messages/errors.

Code (csharp):

1. [Amplify] /Volumes/Projects Drive/Projects/Amplify/Amplify_Test/Assets/../Library/AmplifyCache/PlaceholderDiffuse.tga already exists
2.   at System.IO.File.Copy (System.String sourceFileName, System.String destFileName, Boolean overwrite) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
3.   at System.IO.File.Copy (System.String sourceFileName, System.String destFileName) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
4.   at AmplifyInternalEditor.CacheAuxiliaryTextures (.AmplifyTexture asset) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
5.   at AmplifyInternalEditor.BuildCheck (.AmplifyTexture asset) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
6.   at AmplifyInternalEditor.OnEditorUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
7. UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
8. AmplifyError:ErrorShutdown(Exception, Boolean)
9. AmplifyInternalEditor:OnEditorUpdate()
10. UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions()

and then...

Code (csharp):

1. [Amplify] The AmplifyManager was disabled, re-enabling it will please re-enable it once any issues are resolved.
2. UnityEngine.Debug:LogWarning(Object)
3. AmplifyError:ErrorShutdown(Exception, Boolean)
4. AmplifyInternalEditor:OnEditorUpdate()
5. UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions()

I have tried deleting the cache files, the cache directory, the Amplify Texture many times. Sometimes I get the above errors, so times I get instant hard crash when tying to re-enable the script.

Clearing out Amplify files and loading 1.2.2 back into my scene works fine.

Unity 3.3f4, OSX 10.6.7, MacPro

Any ideas?

 

Seon, thanks for posting all that info. Should have done more intensive testing on OSX. Unfortunately it's a bit late here but I'll get on it ASAP.

 

No problems... appreciate its late and you replying. Do you want my project file? Will it help you?

 

Fortunately the error message is clear and I should be able to reproduce it. Most likely a simple fix. I'll get back to you if the situation changes.

 

I've successfully tracked down and fixed the bug. Here's a fixed revision.

Please let me know if you encounter other issues.

 

Wicked, thanks for the quick response and fix!

 

There seems to be a problem with drag-and-drop on OSX. The DragAndDrop editor class simply doesn't give out the proper information. While it works, it immediately assigns the material once hovering happens and instead should wait for the drop (button up). I'm going to submit a bug report for this.

 

Bump for the last of a small set of revisions focused on stability and polishing.

Changes

• Deploy now removes FreeImage modules from the build during VT deployment.
• Cleared all freeimage dependencies from runtime modules.
• Fixed invalid physical cache on lost render textures, viewport resize and hopefully all the other possible cases.
• Fixed invalid first frame.
• Fixed/added asset versioning.
• Other small fixes to improve stability.

Our focus has now changed to finishing our showcase demo and publishing Amplify.
There's is still time, however, to improve stability before the proper release. Please let us know if there are any pending issues.

 

Will this work in a web player or in iOS?

 

Diogo, any chance that repeating textures will get some loving before this version goes gold? Now allowing artists to work with non-repeating textures is not only a bad art decision and cumbersome for artists to work with, but also an expensive graphics pipeline decision due to a many more verts needing to be loaded and sent to the graphics hardware due to discontinuous verts.

It also makes it hard for companies to integrate Amplify into existing games without requiring them/us to re-make massive amounts of art assets.

Pretty please?