Basis Universal Texture Format in Unity

Fairly recently, Binomial released Basis with open source compressor and transcoder. Is it possible to use the Basis file format in Unity? Does Unity have any plans to support the Basis file format?

 

Upvote!

 

While Unity is considering whether or not to support the Basis format, is there any way we can implement it on our own without the engine source code? I have not found any events or functions to override that would allow us to implement it but I am curious if there is anything I have overlooked.

 

To implement it yourself you'd have to compress the files into the .basis format yourself external to Unity. You could then presumably implement the transcoder as a native plugin, or manually rewrite it into c#, though I'm not sure their license allows for that. You could either load the .basis files manually like you would for manually loaded .jpg files, send the bytes through the transcoder, and then create a Texture2D of the correct format & dimensions and apply the bytes returned by the transcoder.

You could also possibly implement them as scriptable objects so you can load the .basis files into an asset package as the raw bytes, to again transcode at runtime.

The hard part would be having them as assets you could apply as textures in the editor. That I have no idea how you would do it.

 

Good suggestions bgolus. I was thinking something along the same lines and abandoned it when I was trying to consider how to link the textures to the assets in a way that is artist friendly and integrates well with other Unity features like asset bundles. I was hoping to find some events I could tap into or functions that would allow me to implement my own functions for encoding and decoding texture assets. Assuming I could do that, it would likely work with any other Unity feature since the engine would still recognize it as a texture asset.

 

Looks like a very interesting option for any app that loads textures from the web, however, you probably would want to pack a number of textures into a larger file to reduce number of HTTP requests.

However it would be great if Unity would support basis in an API like: Texture2D.LoadImage(byte[] data, bool markNonReadable = false);

 

I'd really love to see the adoption of some kind of technology that minimises one or more of project size, install size, and memory usage.

I'd imagine that since Unity is still the go-to engine for Mobile and Nintendo Switch development, the adoption of something like Basis would greatly benefit the userbase.

https://www.khronos.org/blog/google...to-khronos-gltf-3d-transmission-open-standard

Even moreso since Unity controls a large asset store and could support and encourage asset creators to use more optimised texture technologies.

 

Isn't the main selling point that basis supports to expand its data to various texture formats, which allows to have the same basis file that could expand to ASTC on phones with ASTC support and to ETC on phones that don't support ASTC for example. All this with the same basis file of course.

 

An ETC1 texture is 4 bits per pixel. With compression maybe 3.5 bits stored? A Basis Universal can be 0.5~2 bits per pixel. The advantage is download size.

Granted PVRTC can be 2 bits per pixel, so there’s less advantage there.

 

>expand to ASTC on phones
Astrologers announced a week of importing on scene load, loading time increase by +5000%.

 

Are you making fun of ASTC’s compression times? Because one of the other advantages of Basis is the compression/encoding times are much faster than ASTC, and the transcoding from Basis to ASTC is real-time. Part of idea behind Basis, like Crunch before it, is the time to load the image from “disc” and transcode it is less than loading the final format normally.

Quality wise, the resulting ASTC won’t be as high quality as a texture directly encoded into that format, but hopefully will be better than ETC1. That is however the big question mark @aleksandrk was getting at.

 

Other benefits are less memory usage and faster loadi times.

 

Yeah, the “less memory usage” thing is misleading. Basis means smaller on “disk” build sizes and potentially faster initial loading times. Memory usage is the same or slightly higher.

 

If you look at the typical Indie project, a significant number of gigabytes - the majority of the project - is taken up by texture files. Same for Store Assets. Reducing on-disk storage size would be highly beneficial.

 

Yeah, are we taking project folder or final built game size?

If you really do mean project folder you're talking about source assets, and you really want to use uncompressed assets for the project, be that PNG, TGA, or PSD is irrelevant to the final built game assets. Personally I prefer TGA or PSD over PNG because it takes so long to save PNG files that now you're waiting for the PNG compress, decompress, and GPU format compress each time you update a texture instead of just the GPU compressing. PNG is bad for iteration. Basis files shouldn't be used as source assets because they're heavily compressed already, similar to a medium quality JPG (another format you don't want to use as a source format if you can help it).

If you're talking about a built game, sure. It's basically crunch 2.0.

Also I've never worked on a game where the textures were the largest part of either the project or build. Usually it's audio.

 

What about compressing texture arrays? Wouldn't basis be vastly superior to Unity's compression in this regard?

 

Basis supports texture arrays, and texture arrays are now (finally) a first class citizen with Unity 2020.2, so it's plausible it could be supported if they chose to add Basis support. And yes, a Basis compressed texture array would be much smaller on disk than one only compressed with the default package compression.

But that's not really a surprise since Basis textures are vastly superior to Unity's default package compression of any texture asset, at least in terms of on disk package size. That's its whole purpose, do a better job at compressing already compressed textures than a general purpose compression algorithm would alone. Even if it didn't natively support arrays it'd still be better. Just like using Crunch to store the textures and building the array at runtime would be right now.

 

Better texture storage (compression) for the project would save me about $100 a year in Plastic SCM hosting fees. Its definitely worth it.

 

This isn't applied to the project's source assets, so it won't affect how large your source depot is. Unless you are storing compiled builds or asset packages in your depot as well. Generally compressed texture assets are stored locally in a temp folder, or in a cache server (which can also be local), separate from the asset folder. So unless you're creating texture assets manually in script (which you might be if you're using texture arrays pre 2020.2), or storing the local cache in your depot (which you probably shouldn't be) then this wouldn't change anything for you.

If you're concerned with texture asset size, make sure all of your source texture assets are saved as .PNG files, or .JPG if you're okay with loosing some image quality. That'll actually be about on par with Basis in terms of disk space savings.

 

Unity already supports Crunch texture compression, and some popular shipped Unity games have used it successfully to reduce download times / disk space usage and improve loading times compared to regular DXT texture compression + LZ file compression.

Since Crunch is already useful, it follows that Basis is even more useful (since it supports a wider range of native formats and platforms).

 

Adding to that, Basis would help device dependent compression with WebGL. As it currently stands, Unity has no solution for device specific GPU compression formats in WebGL.

 

Right now @atteneder has been writing a plugin to support .ktx, .ktx2 and .basis files. Check out KtxUnity, our team is already using it along with various GLTF loading plugins like GLTFUtility and Piglet for our WebGL support.

@florianpenzkofer @aleksandrk : Any update on where Unity stands on making support for .basis officially supported? It definitely makes sense for platforms like WebGL that desperately need the reduce transmission file size and VRAM benefits of .basis.

 

Any updates on this ? For unity on webgl, this would be a massive boost in loading times and performance. I really think this should be a top prio for the webgl team

 

Bump, any update on this? Basis seems to be also interesting for compressed video textures

 

Any news about Basis Universal support on Unity?

In this thread the comments highlighted the size and performance benefits. Unity team members questioned the advantage of Basis over using ETC2 as the quality of Basis was lower than ETC2. But now Basis supports two modes: a high quality mode which is internally based off the UASTC compressed texture format, and the original lower quality mode which is based off a subset of ETC1 called "ETC1S". UASTC is for extremely high quality (similar to BC7 quality) textures, and ETC1S is for very small files. In practice, using Basis we will all be happy and we will have all the advantages.
Another very important advantage that we will have if Unity implements Basis is that it is a solution to provide compressed textures suitable for use on either desktop or mobile devices without building separate texture assets for each platform. This will allow Unity to become more popular as a tool for creating 3D content for the Web.

Please prioritize Basis Universal support on Unity!

 

I'm still super confused why this isn't integrated. As far as I can tell: Integrating basis allows us to have _one_ set of intermediate textures, that allows, at runtime, very fast transcoding into the native format for the on-device GPU. On android, even today - our customers have a lot of devices that still don't support ASTC, so we're stuck on ETC2.

 

Any updates on Basis support or nothing yet? Been a while since it landed on the task board