Virtual Texturing 2020.1a15

Hello! I found this in release note of a15:

"Graphics: Add support for Virtual Texturing to the Editor and Player"

So there is many question about this.
But firstly - how is it working, I mean - just enable in package manager? or I need to do additional work? Is it working on mobile platforms? And how it works with Texture Streaming - together, separately or independently?

Thanks in advance!

 

I'd probably assume it's something that only comes with HDRP as an additional feature, just like raytracing is.

 

any demo for this ? maybe can start to make open world~

 

Can not know how to use virtual Texture ...and sparse texture support on mac book?

 

Doesn't look like it, it looks like a proper unmanaged-side feature with a proper managed API.

 

... why not give a schedule roadmap to the new feature? every feature is preview or still working ,let developper waiting and waiting ,i think it is not good ,guy! Can u learn from the unreal engine? every new feature their introduced,will soon get in the new beta version, like this virtual texture.

 

Because they aren't ready to communicate on things that are very very early development. In other words, people are disappointed when things change.

Honestly? people need to start looking at what is available today. If it is not here today, do not plan for it in your project - at all. If everyone looked at judging if Unity is suitable from LTS, it would be a perfect situation I think

Why am I even online right now? because I am a nerd.

 

What does virtual texturing mean?

 

Texture streaming. You can use more high res textures without flooding the vram.

 

Most likely an implementation of this tech:
https://graphinesoftware.com/blog/2019-03-19-unity-technologies-acquires-graphine

 

Granite looks like an amazing SDK. Supporting 262,144 x 262,144 texture resolutions is an incredible accomplishment.

 

but still no example to see

 

I just noticed that comment on the release notes and rushed to test this from HDRP's WIP virtual texturing branch on github. Had to change bunch of things to make it run on 2020.1.0a18 and I got it to a point where it's not throwing any errors and I get this on console when I open the project: "Scriptable renderpipeline VT enabled" but there's obviously some required tooling missing.

I don't see any new menu entries anywhere to author or conf virtual texturing (as was done with Granite for Unity). I see the checkbox to enable VT, I've enabled virtualtexturing package and added the ENABLE_VIRTUALTEXTURES to player to enable the feat but there's some key things still missing

As for what this will be for, I wouldn't expect built-in renderer to support VT at all but looking at SRP github, they seem to be implementing VT support for both URP and HDRP.

And as for roadmap, this WAS told to be coming during 2020 on Unite Copenhagen's roadmap talk:

 

2020 ,is one year time,so can not know when will vt comes~

 

This should give the insight that Unity wasn't certain how long it'll take to get it published other than it'll happen through 2020 cycle. Having VT API implemented on editor and player already does give impression we might see first previews of VT this spring or summer.

If Unity could give more exact dates on this, I'm sure they would but there can be tons of things that affect when this can and will be published to us. Staff comment from december was clear: they are not ready to give more info at that point and it's not even been a month since that comment.

 

so ,unity is draw so many big cakes for developper to wait for one year over one year ,like ecs??ECS still not can build for ios.

 

I think this is the wrong place to take issue, This is actually an exiting new feature thats on the way, and I'm really looking forward to it.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/workflow-case-study-show-us-your-pain.637552/

In this thread your feedback may be better placed.

 

Agreed feedback there is also welcome. I've thread banned dreamerflyer for being way off topic. This isn't an ECS whine thread.

If a feature isn't available yet, it doesn't give you the right to bring unrelated issues into other threads.

 

I hope this supports terrain. We are making a top down game and it would allow us to move away from splat maps. Instead using one big handcrafted texture.

 

this appeared on PR's: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/pull/5571

It's still kinda same deal as before though as there's no easy way to verify these SG nodes make any difference and we don't have any info how the internal atlas is used etc. The nodes mentioned on the PR are these:

 

virtual texturing was available in the past as a plugin by a group I can´t recall its name atm. They also had vector motion blur when this was not available and some other neat plugins.

The thing is I would love to know if this is going to be HDRP exclusive as I'm preparing a new city map and I would love to be lazy and texture everythign with a gazilling textures and later on in the engine attlass all the estuff into the megatexture and save me some steps and even gain on texture quality

 

It looks to be a feature of SRP so I think it'll be fine. You are also thinking of Amplify.

 

Exactly, thank you, I checked how their progress was since the v2 was in development like forever, now seems like they've finished.
http://amplify.pt/unity/amplify-texture-2/

They may have discontinued tho as I know they recently dropped development in a bunch of assets to focus on a few.

 

Amplify Texture was almost clone of Granite (which Unity acquired), almost identical setup etc. This new VT integration does work bit differently though, at least how you use it.

I tried the VirtualTexturing branch on 2020.1.0a24 the other day and there's a test project on SRP repo that has VT test scene. It's not really telling that much other than VT is already functional but tooling is still scarce.

For example there's no VT tile debug tool currently. I did find it on the shader bundled with Unity installation, but it's disabled even if you enable GRA_DEBUG_TILES. I hope they restore the functionality with it soon as without it, it's really hard to visually tell the VT is working properly.

Here's a small image dump of things on the current VirtualTexturing branch for HDRP:










For the two VT nodes, you can set the amount of slots from the node's own settings, on the images there's two slots but you can set more. Also you can set the texture slot to be for normal map or regular texture.

 

Great to know!!

sounds like is quite advanced in development, can´t wait to test

 

It's 100% not worth going with amplify's virtual texturing. They're lovely people but really, it'll be free and well supported in Unity soon enough.

However it looks like people will be needing to roll their own tooling for it in the near term.

 

It's not really question of going with them or not, they've stopped licensing it for new customers for few years now. Also since Granite for Unity has been pulled from sale (for new customers), there really isn't any option out there but the upcoming SRP VT if you use Unity.

 

Any plan to support URP in mobile platform in future?

 

Please integrate an API for custom and buildIn Lightmaps compareable to the Unreal implementation.