UMBRA 3 Overview
Read the full Umbra technical documentation
The purpose of Umbra 3 is to increase frame rate and help you get better performance out of your game.
Umbra 3 does this by optimizing critical parts of a game such as rendering and by providing tools to help with content streaming and game logic. We offer solutions that either work 100% on the CPU or use both the CPU and the GPU.
Umbra 3 builds an internal representation of a game scene and uses this data at runtime to perform efficient queries that can be used to e.g. determine the set of visible objects for the player or determine the set of objects that are within a given distance from a point.
Umbra 3 is available for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, pc, iOS, PlayStation Vita and others on request.
How Does UMBRA 3 Work?
Umbra 3 has three components: Umbra 3 Optimizer, Umbra 3 Runtime and Umbra 3 OB.
Umbra 3 Optimizer is a content processing tool that takes the geometry
of a 3D scene as input and automatically generates data that can be
used at runtime to optimize performance-critical computation. Umbra 3
Optimizer uses auto-generated portals and PVS to represent the scene
data in a format that can be effectively accessed at runtime.
Umbra 3 Runtime uses the data generated by Umbra 3 Optimizer to
perform different types of queries. Visibility queries are used to
find out the set of objects visible from a point or region, distance
queries to find out the topological distance to objects and
intersection queries to find out the set of objects that intersect
with a given shape.
Umbra 3 OB is a stand-alone component that is intended for use in scenes that are extremely dynamic, for instance scenes with destructible enviroments. Umbra 3 uses both the CPU and the GPU to determine the visibility. Umbra 3 OB is supported on PlayStation 3, Windows and Xbox 360 platforms.
Rendering Optimization
Umbra 3 point visibility queries are used to determine the objects
that are visible from the camera’s point of view.
Performance is gained on both the CPU and GPU since hidden objects can be culled out in an early stage. Umbra 3 point visibility queries help you render complex game worlds full of detail.
Optimized Streaming
Umbra 3 region visibility queries are used to determine the objects
that are visible from a given region in a 3D scene.
Umbra 3 region visibility queries can be used to determine which objects could become visible during the next 30 seconds of game play. You save memory by not loading in data that’s not needed for rendering in the near future.
Game Logic Optimization
Umbra 3 distance queries can be used to determine the approximate
topological distance between two points or to find out the set of
objects within a given distance from a point.
Umbra 3 distance queries help decide which AIs need to be activated, sound sources that are relevant to the player and scripted events that need to be processed.
Fast Parallel Processing
Umbra 3 queries work independently from rendering and they don’t need any updates from the game engine. This makes it possible to process multiple Umbra 3 queries whenever you want to without having to worry about synchronization.
Umbra 3 queries only use static data for processing. This makes Umbra 3 queries extremely fast. For example a single point visibility query takes about 0.1ms of CPU time.
Incremental Bake
This feature enables changes to be made to a scene so that only the affected areas’ visibility information needs to be re-computed instead of having to bake the entire scene again. The bake process can be easily distributed across multiple threads or over a network, and the results can be cached so that they are available to the entire development team without having to re-bake the entire scene locally.
Evaluation and licensing explained
It is very easy to try out Umbra 3.
Simply type in your information into our Evaluation form (not automated!) and tell us which platform you want to try out Umbra3 on. Upon receiving your information, we will send you a download link to the relevant Umbra3 SDK including full technical documentation (such as the API reference) with an evaluation key.
You will have an 30 day evaluation period during which you have full access to our customer support.
For more information, any questions that you might have, please contacts us at sales@umbrasoftware.com
Customer Support
During the evaluation period you have full access to our customer support, which is handled by our engineers who work on Umbra3 on a daily basis. Upon licensing you get full support with benefits.
We take great pide in our highly effective and quick support which is handled via email, Skype (conf calls, IM chats) and on-site visits, which is great way to kick-start the collaboration between your studio and Umbra.
Umbra has an extensive, continuously updating online Support library which has detailed technical documentation and support materials such as programming guides, sample code and tutorials
We handle support in English as well as Japanese and Chinese via our international representatives.
Evaluation
Umbra 3 evaluation version is available for you to try you. If you are interested
in evaluating Umbra 3 and seeing what it can do for your game, fill out the web contact form here
or send email to
