Come see Umbra 3 in action GDC 2012 – North Hall, booth #1638
For GDC 2012 meetings, email us here
See the GDC 2012 floorplan here
Some of the things we’ll be demoing and showcasing at Game Developer Conference 2012
Incremental Bake – check out how 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.
Grizzly culling – Our new software occlusion culling system, which rasterizes a software depth buffer that is used to test visibility and allows dynamic object tests to be done at with very little cost per frame. The accuracy of the algorithm is near that of hardware occlusion queries, but – being a purely a software implementation – void of any synchronization and portability issues typical to hardware-based occlusion culling.
Multiplatform – See Umbra occlusion culling running live on consoles such as PS3, Xbox 360 as well as iOS platforms
What is Umbra rendering optimization middleware?
Umbra 3 is a rendering optimization middleware that is used to improve framerates and help to create visually striking game worlds. Umbra 3 does this by optimizing critical parts of a game such as rendering, audio and game logic with highly effective content streaming. Umbra automatically generates portals for game scenes in pre-process taking away tedious manual work from artists. The generated portal data is then used at runtime to perform fast and efficient visibility queries. Graphics development is moving from annotation to having all systems automatically reacting to polygon soups. This is not so much about random polygons coming and going during runtime, but about scene composition in the pipeline. Umbra 3 is the key enabler of this paradigm shift.
To try out Umbra 3, go here for Evaluations
Available for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, pc, PlayStation Vita and future platforms
Why choose Umbra 3?
1. Optimized performance & better fps Umbra 3 optimizes critical parts of a game such as rendering, audio and game logic.It also provides tools to help with visibility based, content streaming. Umbra 3 saves resources that enable your engine to achieve a better rendering performance.
2. Save development time – Automated portal generation Traditionally artists spend considerable time placing portals into a game scene. Umbra 3 removes the need for this manual work by generating the portals automatically from arbitrary polygon soup. Umbra 3’s lean runtime integration uses this data to rasterize a depth buffer that can be used to do highly efficient occlusion culling of both static and dynamic objects.
3. Fast pre-process – Incremental Bake Pre-processing tasks such as lightmap and occlusion pre-computation can take hundreds of hours of valuable artist time. Incremental Bake 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.
4. Effective and resource-light runtime performance Umbra has a very low memory footprint and typically only uses 1-2ms of CPU time each frame. Umbra runs independently from all the other processes in your engine so it can be easily configured to run in parallel with the other CPU threads. No matter what your hardwareplatform is and what type of scenes you have in your game; large scenes with many dynamic objects or interior spaces, Umbra offers a visibility solution that works.
5. Proven technology – easy to integrate Our technology is constantly being tested, improved and maintained. It’s maturity has been proved in several shipped, high-profile titles. You can safely integrate Umbra in at any stage of your game and engine development, whether that is early on when you are building your technology or at later stage when you are looking for that final performance gain.
