Introducing Amplify Texture - Massive Virtual Texturing for Unity Pro

I've been working in Unity and have currently ran into an issue with the asset folder being larger than 2GB, and thus refusing to build out the scene. The scene as a ridiculous amount of maps, but I need to keep them without lowering the resolution just so the scene will build.

Is this an issue that Amplify can fix, or is it unaffected on account of the file compression?

 

Have a bunch of questions (assuming it's all good on Unity 5)!

1. does this work on PS4?
2. does it work with Alloy PBS?
3. what is the ms cost of using amplify, all things being equal ie with and without amplify using the unity standard shader on same hardware ie a mid range desktop card?

Thanks

 

Hello,

What Unity version are you currently using and what is your target platform? Is it 32 or 64 bit? From your description it sounds like an issue related to the Resource folder itself.

Absolutely, assuming you can use a compatible Amplified Shader you can easily export projects with several gigabytes of virtualized texture data, it's virtually unlimited. We recommend checking out our fully functional trial version and seeing for yourself what it can do for your project.

Amplify Texture 2 Trial: Download

Project and Scene Setup Tutorials: Video - Manual

For quick reference: Amplify Supports the Unity 4 Legacy Shaders, the new Unity 5 Standard Shaders, Alloy, Skyshop and Lux.

Let us know if you need any additional information, we would be happy to help.

 

1. Console support is planned for post-launch. However, we don't have a solid ETA yet.

2. Yes, we collaborate directly with the Alloy developers in order to ensure the best compatibility possible.

3. There is a price to pay for this type of flexibility; e.g. a quick pre-pass to a tiny buffer (and associated readback to CPU), slightly more complex shaders, continuous tile streaming and decompression and tile uploads to the GPU.

From simple scenes to scenes boosting over 100 Gigabytes of texture data Amplify will scale accordingly, always with a fixed and predictable performance cost and small RAM footprint.

It’s a bit harder to determine an exact millisecond cost for the process, comparing a group of objects using the Standard Shader vs Amplified might not be the best way to measure performance. DirectX/GL version, Shaders used, scene complexity, and platform, are all important factors in the resulting performance.

As an example, with DirectX 11 the Pre-Pass that determines which textures to stream is much faster than in DX9 but in practice their capabilities and texture capacity are equal. Amplified shaders are slightly more complex but the performance differences are negligible. When adapting the production workflow to take the most out of Amplify, the benefits will most certainly make up for the costs - e.g. time saved in draw calls when using Multi-Tile UVs can easily compensate all the other performance costs, and then some - as you can see in our Standard vs Amplified & Amplify Your Game videos.

Ultimately, we always recommend that our potential customers try out the full featured evaluation version in order to find out, first hand, if the benefits really do outweigh the costs in their specific usage case.

 

Right yeah! we target DX11 and PS4 only, so we don't need to worry about anything except PS4 (and optionally Xbox one) performance. The price is fine etc - just worried about investment cost, artist cost, workflow cost - you know the risk cost of using it so I need to wait till PS4/XB1 support is solid.

Thanks for reply

 

Sounds great, you will definitely be able to take advantage of more advanced optimizations. We understand, that's why we are not advertising it much before the official launch. At the moment we are aiming more at development support from early adopters.

Workflow wise users do not have to change much to take advantage of our product. It does provide a few interesting uses that might in the mid-long run actually help reduce production times, generally speaking of course.

Let us know if you have any additional questions we would be happy to help.

 

Currently evaluating hopefully your PS4 support with be absolutely top drawer

 

Awesome, we will keep you posted on any new developments.

Thank you for evaluating AT2.

 

Hello,

I am currently evaluating AT2 and it works great. I did find that its not compatible with RTP and I do not wish to try and make it work. What asset would you recommend to enable the best visual quality of multiple terrains and terrain textures while still being compatible with AT2?

Also, do you recommend a texture pack for landscapes? I'm looking for the best.

Thank you.
Nate

 

Hello Nate,

Thank you for your interest in Amplify Texture 2, we really appreciate it. Unity Terrain support is still in its early stages and Amplify currently supports base terrain Color+Normal maps; single textures or Multi-Tile UV collections.

For large scale procedural terrains we definitely recommend checking out World Machine. So many awesome Assets it's hard to pick just one. Check out Manufactura K4 and Quantum Theory; World Composer is great for real-world texture data and it's capable of exporting 16k x 16k texture tiles.

Feel free to get in touch via email I would be happy to provide additional information specific to your terrain requirements.

Thanks!

 

Just an update:

Our evaluation of Amplify 2 has failed or been rejected because the tool chain isn't up to scratch yet. The tech seems sound but the tech isn't very useful if we struggle to get the uvs working. According to our creative director, the uv tool in max is buggy / not really working.

If you could fix that up, or help in getting our content working in a robust manner, it would surely fix all issues and enable us to purchase the licenses. Tech is only as good as the ability to use it I understand that this is still WIP though and not finished. Any thoughts or encouragement here could change our minds. Best of luck with the future.

 

Hello,

Thank you for your feeback. From our earlier email exchange I understand where you are coming from as a 3dsMax user but just to be very clear to other users that might come across this post, our 3dsMax Bake tool is by no means a requirement in a Amplify Texture 2 workflow, the use of Multi-Tile UV's is also completely optional.

There is no fixed Amplify Texture 2 workflow / tool chain per say, depending on your 3d authoring program your workflow will likely vary. Be it with Modo, Maya, Zbrush, Mudbox, MARI or any other piece of software, regardless of the method used AT2 will virtualize the data that it's added to it's virtual textures. In a sense you do not have to change your workflow, you just need to feed AT2 the best possible resolution assets you can create.

About the Bake Tool, what challenges did you face more specifically? It's in its early stages and we're absolutely dedicated to improving it, any constructive feedback is very welcome. Unlike the MODO bake tool set for example, 3dsMax really lacks in the baking/packing department, that's one of the main reasons why we decided to develop this tool. If possible please get in touch via email, even if you end up not using it we would love to know how we can improve it.

Thanks!

 

We will be in touch, thanks for the heads up! So MODO is actually working out of the box in this respect and we could use that instead?

 

Thanks, we really appreciate your feedback. MODO is much more flexible when it comes to baking, you should definitely check out the MODO Baking UI Kit. They also have a few interesting packing and baking improvements planned for the next release, definitely worth checking out in their latest promotional video.

Regarding your specific workflow with 3dsMax, was the UV packing the main issue? You could always use a separate tool such as UV-Packer and bake with our tool.

Thanks!

 

hi guys, are you still working on this?

 

In case the guys are still away for weekend I will answer here that they are! and its great stuff so we're thinking of using again!

 

Yes, hard at work! I recommend subscribing to the Amplify Texture 2 Development Showcase thread, we will definitely post any new updates there.

We are getting close to a new public update, I'll send you the latest version via PM

Thank you for your post, we really appreciate it. Forum and Email response times should be back to normal soon.

Thanks!

 

Hi all

Sorry if this has been asked already but does this work with shader forge?

Would be amazing if it does!!!

Thanks

Will

 

Hello Will,

Thank you for your interest, we really appreciate it. At the moment shaders created in Shader Forge have to be converted manually, we hope to simplify the use of node based editors in the near future.

Thanks!

 

+1 for Shader Forge support

 

New version crashes for us after launching a build.

========== OUTPUTING STACK TRACE ==================

0x0037EA71 (gv) Camera::OnRenderSurfaceDestroyed
0x003C5DCE (gv) IAnimation::IAnimation
0x004E1442 (gv) RenderTexture:estroySurfaces
0x004E3842 (gv) RenderTexture::Release
0x03D598A7 (Mono JIT Code) (wrapper managed-to-native) UnityEngine.RenderTexture:INTERNAL_CALL_Release (UnityEngine.RenderTexture)
0x03D59869 (Mono JIT Code) UnityEngine.RenderTexture:Release ()
0x0541B9FA (Mono JIT Code) AmplifyTexture.PrePassestroyTextures ()
0x03D5958C (Mono JIT Code) AmplifyTexture.PrePassestroy ()
0x03D5946A (Mono JIT Code) AmplifyTextureCameraBase:InternalFinalize ()
0x0541D232 (Mono JIT Code) AmplifyTextureCameraBase:CheckDataIntegrity ()
0x054192E2 (Mono JIT Code) AmplifyTextureCameraBase:OnPreRender ()
0x0533F0C9 (Mono JIT Code) (wrapper runtime-invoke) object:runtime_invoke_void__this__ (object,intptr,intptr,intptr)
0x100F080B (mono) mono_set_defaults
0x1005D91C (mono) mono_runtime_invoke
0x0050B07E (gv) scripting_gchandle_get_target
0x0058FA1A (gv) ScriptingArguments::AddString
0x004FD253 (gv) IIMGUI::IIMGUI
0x0037021D (gv) ProxyTransfer::SetScriptingObject
0x0036BE4E (gv) GameObject::SendMessageAny
0x00387540 (gv) Camera::Render
0x00388286 (gv) Camera::Render
0x003C6593 (gv) IAnimation::IAnimation
0x005680FF (gv) RectT<int>::Contains
0x0056841D (gv) RectT<int>::Contains
0x005FEFBB (gv) Renderer::GetSceneHandle
0x0060171E (gv) PlayerWinMain
0x009F8B08 (gv) RectT<int>::GetBottom
0x00A27FC8 (gv) RectT<int>::GetBottom
0x747238F4 (KERNEL32) BaseThreadInitThunk
0x775E5DE3 (ntdll) RtlUnicodeStringToInteger

========== END OF STACKTRACE ===========

Rolling back to older version fixes the issue.

Unity 5.4.0.f3 version.

 

Hi Jog,

We fixed a similar crash caused when resizing the GameView window. Can you resize the game view without problems?

Cheers

 

No, actually sometimes game launch without crashing and than resizing the window crashes it. It looks like that's exactly the issue.

 

Is there an ETA for mobile support? Also, will this work with custom shaders? If not, will there be a work flow to incorporate it ?

 

The issue reported above by @Jog has been corrected, be sure to update to the latest version available.

 

Hello,

Thank you for your interest, we really appreciate it. There isn't an official ETA, but we are very close to an official launch. Amplify Texture 2 supports custom shaders, be sure to check out the conversion information available in the AT2 Manual, section 14 – How To Convert Your Own Shaders.

Let us know if you have any additional questions, thanks!

 

I have a question.

As our project is quite large Amplify Textures output file on build is rather big. About 3.5gb at this moment.

Everytime we change something in textures - which happens as normal refactoring or some materials issues related with version control we need to click rebuild, if we click update it only adds a new textures, if there was any.

The problem is its rebuilding entire texture file and Steam patching system find those changes as a almost entire file change. So our patches weight 3.6gb while Amplify itself is 3.5gb.

Of course its very painfull and everytime we put a patch like this we loose quite a big bunch of players since for some of them internet transfer is limited and downloading a patch costs more than the game itself.

Is there any way to work this around? Like doing a few files and changing only those which is necessary ?

 

Hello,

Thank you for getting in touch. Amplify Texture 2 provides streamlined, automated incremental builds and deployment. That shouldn't really happen unless your virtual texture is actually being rebuilt. From your description, the update function does not seem to be working as expected, it could be a bug or a possible issue with your current setup. Your players should only need to download the new data added by the update.

If I recall correctly, one of your developers contacted us about a rebuild related issue a year or so. I believe it was resolved at the time, do you use a locally shared virtual texture cache file? Any additional information that could possibly help us debug the issue would be most welcome.

Please elaborate.

Feel free to contact us directly via support@amplify.pt, as an early-adopter you have priority support and access to the latest builds.

Looking forward to your feedback, thanks!

 

I am testing Amplify Texture on my big project, with a lot of assets.
I using 12 virtual textures with about 2/3gb data stored in each.
It's doing great and ram usage went down so much

But many objects have blurred textures like they aren't detected by system (rescaled to 64x64) when many other objects in scene working correctly, I searching google and internet for some documentation, posts about problems like this but there is nowhere info, what should I look for in this situation :|
I am sure, all folders with this materials are included in virtual textures which I attached in amplify texture manager.
I saw few textures had override settings turned on, so I turn it back and on few models it worked, but then after next rebuilding of virtual textures problem occured again

 

Hello,

Thank you for getting in touch, we would be happy to help. Please keep in mind that the original textures are scaled to 64x64 when virtualized, the high-resolution data is stored and streamed from the actual Virtual Texture asset. Do not manually resize the textures, not only will they not be used, they will also needless add to the final build size.

Regarding your specific problem: Can you isolate the asset in question and replicate the problem in a new scene?

Looking forward to your reply, thanks!

 

Surprising fast reply

Yes I noticed that overrided textures are included in memory like without Amplify Texture so I switched it to default unity import settings like other assets - working with amplify textures. (and rebuilded virtual texture)

To the problem, I can do this but unfortunatly I can do this tomorrow.
Like I said, I tried to find in which cases this error can occurs, but didn't found.
It's strange that sometimes almost all assets seems to work but one table is brown (like there's only 64x64 texture)

I had some old shader forge materials, but all I checked was converted correctly (this shaders wasn't doing anything else than current unity's standard shaders)

Generally my project's directories structure needs to be fully recontructed because there is messy.
Maybe you can give me some tips how to organize game folders to avoid problems, which maybe can occur when I will use asset bundles?

Should I put textures in separated folders than meshes and materials or something?
(when asset bundle take texture which was edited by plugin, it will work correctly?)
And I assume that I should make directories which focus on assets which are required in specific game areas, but maybe this one question isn't related much to Ampify Texture, but maybe

 

Hello,

No problem, happy to help.

The problem could be caused by a faulty shader, a missing virtual texture, a surface occluded by a transparent material, a secondary 64x64 texture on top of the base texture, the asset layer could be excluded from the AT Manager Culling list; among a few other possible reasons. We really need to identify the problematic asset in order to debug it.

It's entirely up to you, as long as the Virtual Texture is pointing to the correct materials it wont be a problem. On larger projects it's usually a good idea to organize it by zone/area.

What's your target platform and Unity version?

Thanks!

 

Hi there,
Question to Diogo-Teixeira.
Can we import 2 different existing textures and join them into one ?

 

Greetings,

Join them in what sense? Blend them together?

Thanks!

 

Yes. For example Get a masked texture or a video texture and on that, apply an alpha rejection texture, so the outcome will be a what is being seen / or incoming webcam-video with green color set to alpha==0...

 

Amplify Texture shaders work just as any other Unity shaders, however, virtualized data is pre-processed in the editor. Depending on what you need to virtualize, I'm not entirely sure if AT is right for your requirements. What texture data are you looking to use with AT?

Thanks!

 

To tell you the truth I don't know the answer (or what even your question means!). Moreover I don't really understand how shaders work. I tried some tutorials for shader coding, but found them very bad, and didn't get anything. What I try to do is have different combined effects, that are shader's outcome.
My previous examples are things that I want to do. I have managed to have a masked-chroma key shader by copy pasting 2 different shaders and mixing the lines of code completely out of my mind, but that's all and I know is the wrong way. I was lucky once, but anything else I've tried, failed,so
I am asking if I can simply import arbitrary shaders that I like and combine their visual outcome (or choose aspects of them), because I though that by using tools like Amplify Shader Editor maybe it will be easier to learn shaders coding. I just have to ask, before I purchase something that may not be my solution to my problem.
Thanks!

 

Hello,

That makes sense, you are looking for the Amplify Shader Editor thread, this forum thread is for another product called Amplify Texture 2 that allows you to use a virtually unlimited number of textures without common video memory limitations.

Node-based editors are considerably simpler to learn when compared to standard shader programming. I'm not entirely sure about video texture use but I recommend posting your questions on the official thread, the community is very responsive. Regarding your question, you can easily mask textures with ASE.



Be sure to check the Manual and Tutorials available in our product wiki.

Thanks!

 

@Amplify_Ricardo Are there any demos of how Amplify Texture works in VR? I'm really interested in using it in some of our projects.

A quick question on this: Some of our models need very high detail in specific areas: For instance, let's say examining a TV in VR close-up might show a small crack or defect in the surrounding plastic. We'd like that are to be very high detail when the VR camera is close to the object. Would something like this be possible with Amplify Texture?

Edit: Taking a quick look at the trial version, there's no samples. Do you have any sample scenes and assets?

 

Hello,

Unfortunately, we currently do not offer any VR demos. In any case, it's quick to setup, you simple add the AT camera component to the VR rig camera as you would with a standard camera. AT would be perfect for that application, it allows you to use a virtually unlimited amount of textures without compromising quality or performance, it's perfect for VR.

Have you had the chance to try the fully functional trial version? Which HMD are you currently using? I would be happy to help you set it up.

Thanks!

 

Hello, I've been playing with the Amplify Texture 2 demo with a bunch of models from our project, getting some comparisons between non-amplify builds and amplify builds to see how much VRAM and RAM is saved by using Amplify. We're projecting our game RAM usage will fly past 10GB once all the art's in if we don't do some sort of disk streaming, and we want to get the usage down to 6-8GB tops.

It seems like right now VRAM usage is much lower with it, however RAM usage doesn't go down but is about 50MB higher consitantly and there seems to be 0 disk usage when moving around the scene. Does the virtual texture get fully loaded into RAM when the game starts, or perhaps it does some amount of disk streaming when RAM usage goes past a certain point?

 

Greetings,

Thank you for evaluating AT2, we really appreciate it. AT2 is primarily aimed at VRAM reduction, it does help reduce RAM usage assuming that the usage was caused by none-virtualized texture data.

AT has a very small memory footprint, can you pinpoint that extra usage? We would love to know more.

Amplify Texture 2 only uses your VRAM and Disk for streaming purposes, nothing is offloaded to the RAM; usage is kept at a consistent level regardless of texture quantity in any given scene. (Cache Size)

Let me know if you have any followup questions, I would be happy to elaborate.

Thanks!

 

Yeah after thinking about it I may be underappreciating Unity's ability to stream in textures from disk given their async ring buffer [which should only use a limited amount of actual RAM], so I shouldn't expect any differences between Amplify and Unity textures in RAM as long as I don't enable read-write in the import settings [which I should do a pass on], VRAM would be the major point of contention between the two, I'll keep that in mind.

 

AT2 works a bit differently, it does not "load textures", so to speak. All virtualized data is pre-processed and stored in a highly optimized proprietary format that allows for highly efficient streaming at runtime; the original textures are not used by the system.

In terms of RAM use and quantity, AT2 provides the best solution regardless of the texture quantity or resolution. It truly allows for a virtually unlimited amount of textures per-scene, without canalizing RAM or going over the set VRAM cache limit.

This unique technique provides zero texture loading times, be it with 10GB, or even 100GB. of texture data per-scene; without ever running into common limitations.

Looking forward to any additional questions.

 

So after some more tinkering decided to try it against GPU instanced objects, the replacement Standard shader works as intended where the drawcalls are significantly reduced while rendering the main camera. However, the Prepass camera is not instancing the models, which takes a stress scene from 20 drawcalls to 1200. We're concerned with too many drawcalls in our project so we'd prefer if GPU Instancing is fully supported.

I believe it should be as simple to implement as calling material.enableInstancing = true on the prepass materials and adding UNITY_SETUP_INSTANCE_ID(v); in the PrePass.shader file.

That would put us at ease as number of drawcalls is a big point of contention.

 

Thank you for bringing it up, we will have to examine it in order to determine if instancing support is viable for the Pre-Pass.

We will get back to you as soon as possible.

 

Instancing support for the pre-pass has been added in the latest update.

Thanks!

 

Awesome! Thanks a lot!

 

Does this work with substance painter?

Also would super high quality normal maps cause performance problems?

 

Hi! Finally after some tidying up project I going back to use Amplify Texture.
But there I have first problem.
I created 3 virtual textures, one for mobs second for actors equipement and third for rest stuff from my actors category folder.
Everything is built, all virtual textures are in amplify manager in scene and it's active, amplify texture camera component is assigned but all material aren't streamed. When I add only one virtual texture to manager (mobs) it works great, but when I add another one everything is messed up

What can be wrong? I couldn't find answear for it on wiki.