Introducing Amplify Texture - Massive Virtual Texturing for Unity Pro

Nice ! One last question if I may ask: will it support uv tiles only in mari or in other applications as well ?

For example, I saw that uv tiles have different notations according to the software (region based (mari), zero-based or one-based):

mari
...
1011 ~~ 1012 ~~ 1013 ~~ 1014 ~~ 1015 ~~ ...
1001 ~~ 1002 ~~ 1003 ~~ 1004 ~~ 1005 ~~ ...

zbrush
...
u0 v1 ~~ u1 v1 ~~ u2 v1 ~~ u3 v1 ~~ u4 v1 ~~...
u0 v0 ~~ u1 v0 ~~ u2 v0 ~~ u3 v0 ~~ u4 v0 ~~...

mudbox
...
u1 v2 ~~ u2 v2 ~~ u3 v2 ~~ u4 v2 ~~ u5 v2~~...
u1 v1 ~~ u2 v1 ~~ u3 v1 ~~ u4 v1 ~~ u5 v1~ ...

For modo, the notation seems to be slightly different, with both u offset, v offset, and u and v repeat or reset, according
to this nice article of cgCarter. (unless it is only for applying textures on uv tiles and not for creating uv tiles themselves)


Also, does it mean that when exporting a model with multiple uv tiles, for example created in modo, to unity, AT will know how to read those uv tiles directly out-of-the box ? Because I think I have read somewhere that internally unity is transforming imported models into FBX: does this process preserve uv tiles created into third-party modeling softwares even if unity doesn't handle them, so that AT can use them on its side ?

 

That's correct. Mudbox, WorldMachine were planned. There's also no reason to skip zbrush, so you can count on it.

Shouldn't be a problem. So far I'm getting good results.

Thanks for all the references. They'll certainly help.

 

Is there any limitation on the demo version?

 

No limitations, only a watermark.

Try it out: http://amplify.pt/download/

 

Isn't that a little dangerous?

I mean, someone can just come along, download the demo, remove the watermark, and use it

 

Don’t worry about it, we got it covered.

Thank you for your concern.

 

..

.. OK, and AssetBundles?

 

We can't use assets to store our VT info. Naturally, that also excludes AssetBundles.

Online streaming could still be an alternative for the webplayer. It's not a priority right now, but it's not off the table for future revisions.

 

Good news everyone! We have extended our licensing offer.

We are happy to announce that from now on, instead of the older per-seat/single user license, each license of Amplify products allows for up to 3 users/seats.

This also applies to previously bought licenses. The new EULA document will be sent to existing customers.

Keep up the good work everyone! We are amazed with all the great feedback and work sent to us by our users.

Thank you!

 

That's great news Ricardo

 

Very nice, thank you

 

Hey, does this V2 mean we'll never get the WM integration / very large image support in V1? If so how can we migrate to V2 from V1 licensing Wise?
(can't believe i didn't see this thread untill now! )

 

Hi, get it touch at sales@amplify.pt, we have special deals for existing customers.

Well, in practice you can use large assets from World Machine, unfortunately without Unity Terrain support in Version 1.x.

 

Glad you guys liked the license change, we also offer bulk licensing at a discounted price and site/team licenses.

If you have special licensing needs be sure to contact us directly at sales@amplify.pt.

Keep up the awesome work!

 

Hey, i notice your name (only looked at last name), are you working in family or is diogo no longer on this?
I'll get in touch in any case but what do you mean about WM integration? I don't care about unity terrain (meshes are fine), it's a plus but not a deal breaker, but last we talked he was planning a WM plugin to export to a custom image file format to support single very very large textures without going through unity at all for loading (bypassing the 16K limit by not having those texture imported at all, just fed directly in amplify). Is this planned for V2? My use case is working with 512KX512K "single" textures (not lots of 16K textures, and splitting them to so small textures isn't going to be any nice workflow Wise).

 

Hello Ronan,

I will forward your questions to Diogo, I don’t know the details of what you discussed with him in the past, best to get in touch.

We are not related, just a coincidence on the last name. Diogo is still the owner and lead developer of Amplify Creations, formerly know as Insidious Technologies.

Talk to you soon.

 

I see, i emailed sales like you asked, will he receive it or can you forward it to him else?

 

Yes he will get the email. Thanks

 

Hello Ricardo, how is Amplify 2 coming along?

Do you have an estimate release date? 1 month 3 months 6 months, just a rough estimate.

No rush intended, just curiosity

 

Hi,

Early adopters should have access to development builds around the end of October or early November.

The first release is planned to be on December.

 

That's great !!

oh man it feels good to be an early adopter

Keep up the great work guys

 

The Private forum should also be available around that time.

Awesome times, can't wait to get it out there.

 

I noticed that your support forum is empty, the reason being that this product needs no support, it just works all the time

Also if you have a feature request section I don't think you will have much activity there too because you guys have thought of everything, and are already adding many features to what is already a fantastic product.

"Awesome times, can't wait to get it out there."

hahaha yes indeed it must be crazy awesome for you guys

Your technology is the way of the future!!!

Did any of you guys have one of these moments?

 

Hehe thank you for the kind words.

No forum but we do take requests via email.

Yeah, sometimes it’s hard not to spill the beans on what we are working on, when you see what is being made with Amplify Texture 1 2, you will know what I mean.

Thank you for all the support, we will also be posting some news regarding our other products soon.

 

" we will also be posting some news regarding our other products soon."

other product other than Amplify Color and Amplify motion?

 

Well, that is a hard question.

At the moment the core team is 100% focused on our current products. However, we might have some surprises down the line but it is still soon for public reveals.

 

We are now more than one developer and we have some interesting stuff in development. However, like Ricardo said, we can't disclose them all, but here's a small one we'll be releasing soon:

 

That looks interesting Diogo, can you elaborate a bit about this? can you give me an example of how this will help?

No rush in replying

 

This is a bit of an obscure issue not many people deal with properly. Let's say you bake a normal map from a high poly mesh in 3DSMax. When you import it to Unity and try to use it as-is. This is the result:



Of course, you would immediately try messing around with inverting some channels and could be able to improve it a bit, but it would never look correct. Especially that area closer to the bottom of the bin.

This happens because these blueish maps (tangent space maps) require some math at the mesh level and each application applies its own slightly different calculation.

Ideally, you would use a tool that bakes normal maps into Unity's tangent format. When that's not possible - e.g. a large team using a different set of tools - you can simply load up this tool and convert any map baked in Maya, Max, Mudbox, ZBrush, Modo, etc.. into Unity's native format.

You'll be able to use your tool of choice for baking these maps, without compromising compatibility.

More information about this nonsense can be found at:
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap/

 

Hello Diogo, sorry to bother you again I just need to be sure. does Amplify Motion and Amplify Colour work with Amplify Texture?

Sorry I need to be sure, because Amplify Texture come before anything else.

 

Hi Diogo,

I'm currently aiming at the creation of high resolution projectors in Unity using as input veery high res .tga images generated with AutoCAD for serious game purpose (images are mainly lines with 0 or 1 transparency on every pixel). Could you tell me if is gonna be possible to accomplish these projectors with any sort of setup using Amplify VT?

Thanks!

 

Yes, totally compatible. If you load up all 3 trials into a project, the watermarks will even fit together

Amplify Texture relies on pre-processing at edit time so, if your content is generated at runtime, it won't work. Then again, I'm not sure what you're building. Can you provide more info?

 

Excuse my ignorance but what is veery? or did you mean to write Vray?

 

Hi MoHoe, engineering software nowadays have (almost) infinite resolution, enabling users to generate veery high resolution plots, say banners/outdoor-size plot file while maintaining 1 pixel lines. Not sure exactly how high this resolution would be, but it's definitely high

Hello Diogo, I`ve been using a workflow to generate high quality images from 2D info contained in engineering softwares (like AutoCAD), which I then use in game engine as big decals on the ground for serious game/simulation purposes. On our projects we have several kinds of projections of the same nature (2D lines with alpha channel in between) that could greatly benefit from your tech, since the 4k resolution from Unity is very low - as you may agree - for real-size large projects. Quite often texts and numbers from the drawings cannot be rendered to texture because of poor definition in the engine. Follows an image to exemplify what kind of engineering projs we do https://db.tt/cMfMWq8z

Could I use VT to surpass Unity limits here? Do you need some more info or should I provide some kind of test file?

 

Hello,

If we are talking about 2D texture maps (regardless of how high the resolution is), yes, Amplify Texture does remove those limitations.

I will walk you through the process. If you already know how to use Unity, you wont have any difficulties in taking advantage of Amplify Texture.

Would you like me to test a scene? Get in touch at ricardo@amplify.pt

If you prefer to try it your self, we provide fully functional watermarked trials. Direct Link to Amplify Texture.

The process is extremely simple. Manual

 

Forum acting up, double post, ignore this.

 

Just want to add to what Ricardo said:

For that kind of high frequency detail you will want to use AT2 because of Anisotropic filtering. Should make those lines sharper at a distance compared to AT1. It will also load VT pages much faster so you won't have so much transition between mips.

 

Hello All

You guys said that in Amplify Texture 2 you would be able to use multi uv tiles. At the moment Unity doesn't support mult tiles and that really sucks.

So does that mean AT2 we solve that issue? is this feature terrain only?

Is that function to do with shader or a more deeper level?

The reason I ask is, if you made a shader that would allow for many multi uv tiles then that alone would be great and I think many people would buy that shader. Well I think if it was down to the shader alone it probably would have been released already, but I just need confirmation.

Thanks

 

Yes. AT2 will supoport multipe uv tile grids, as well as multiple virtual textures per scene, and each virtual texture can sample a different UV channel (e.g. uv1 or uv2, maybe more in the future). This will effectively allow us to have diffuse/normal/occlusion/displacement on one VT and light maps on another VT. Or one VT for characters and another one for environments. Or a bunch or them spread around a single continuous level. Or all of this combined.

It's perfectly possible to support tiles only in the shader, but you would still bump into texture slot and video ram limitations. It's also possible to pack a texture grid into a 16K texture and feed it to the shader behind Unity's back. However, this is not the problem we're trying to solve. Our solution is general and is not simply a streaming system. It is a complete, integrated, texturing solution. So rather than spending our time finding a ton of other ways of getting grids into Unity, were using it to improve AT2.

 

Thanks for the info Diogo

 

Hello Guys!!

I've just seen this . Do you think Amplify Texture V2 will work with this sort of thing? it works off specular map.

Keep up the great work guy

 

That's a definite yes! Since it's a post effect it should work fine.

Cheers man

 

HI Ricardo,

I was wondering about this tool but I cannot understand some tech aspect.

For example looking your demo, I cannot understand how this tool manage the multiple resolution of texture linked to object distance from camera.

It is possible that it resize texture resolution according to distance camera?

 

Hi,

Amplify Texture removes the need to resize the textures. The technology allows you to use extremely high resolution textures without compromising performance or quality.

At runtime, the streamed patches are all taken from a single, per-scene, high resolution virtual texture.

The internal workings of the technology are a bit complicated to thoroughly explain here, but, our intention with Amplify Texture is to give you the right tool for the job without technical constrains on your side.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

 

When will have Amplify Texture 2 trial version download ? I would like to try the mobile version before purchase.

 

Consider following us on Twitter, we post all development updates via the service.
@amplifycreates

 

Thanks Diogo

 

Hello Guys,

Just wondering, has Unity 4.3 added new features or access to it's framework which will make this already awesome package more awesome

 

Sorry if it was answered here already.

How well is this product suited for environments with large geometric backgrounds (as opposed to enclosed environments with little to no distant filler)?

Let's say there is a scene on some elevated rooftop, where all high-detail geometry and texturing takes place - no question about AT capabilities for that. Then, under that scene, there is a cityscape with lots of lowpoly geometry stretching for kilometers around. Now, I want to avoid using excess resolution for that geometry as the player will never see it up close. Is it possible to force part of a level to use different texel size for the virtual texturing, or otherwise prevent waste of resources on storing some surfaces in unnecessarily large resolutions?

I don't doubt that AT will be smart about building atlases for the scenery in that case, with distant objects getting less resolution as appropriate, and players won't be burdened performance-wise, so I'm mainly just concerned about inflating the size of a project here. It would be nice to have an ability to define something like "this part of the level hierarchy gets 512px/m2 and this part gets 8px/m2".

 

That's not how it works at all, it stores textures at full resolution (so whatever size YOUR texture are, make them smaller if you want!) and streams as much or as little as needed to get good on screen resolution.

So if you want it to look bad but have low res all the way, just texture it low res to begin with, if not then don't mind it AT will just automagically handle this, the whole point of this kind of tool is to not need to worry about many textures / what resolution you're using, so if the player doesn't see it up close, it will be streamed in low res even if it's textured in high res anyway.