Virtual Textures are broken in the latest version

[PerunCreative]

Hi,

I just bought your asset so that I could replace the trial version, but the problem is that once I import the latest version half of the textures in the virtual texture is not streamed. Rebuild doesn't help. Before this update to full version I was using trial version which was from April and the latest version is one day old so maybe it is something in the newest version. The objects which are not being streamed have the proper shader and layer. I also checked that they are visible by the AT camera. I tried to delete all amplify files and import the clean version, but the result is the same.

Reverting to the trial version from April after rebuild is working, but I am unable to make it work with the latest full version.

How can I solve this? I need to record trailer tomorrow so I am in hurry. Could you send me the previous full version from April?

[Ricardo Teixeira]

Hi,
I just bought your asset so that I could replace the trial version, but the problem is that once I import the latest version half of the textures in the virtual texture is not streamed. Rebuild doesn't help. Before this update to full version I was using trial version which was from April and the latest version is one day old so maybe it is something in the newest version. The objects which are not being streamed have the proper shader and layer. I also checked that they are visible by the AT camera. I tried to delete all amplify files and import the clean version, but the result is the same.
Reverting to the trial version from April after rebuild is working, but I am unable to make it work with the latest full version.
How can I solve this? I need to record trailer tomorrow so I am in hurry. Could you send me the previous full version from April?

Hello,

Thank you for your purchase, we really appreciate it. We would be happy to help you solve any issues that you might be experiencing. We don't recommend using the older version, it had some critical issues that have since been corrected.

You may have simply lost your connections after importing the latest package. Please import the latest package and check if your Amplify Texture Manager and Camera Runtime are active.

What's your current Unity version?
Which shaders do you use?

Thanks!

[PerunCreative]

Hi,

so I managed to find some solution. First I tried to delete and recteate VT with the same settings. It seemed that it solved the problem, but I am using 3 VTs and when I did the same for the second VT then the first one got corrupted and again half of the textures in that VT were not working. So after that I put all my materials/textures under one VT and now it works, howerver it is not practical since Steam is unable to detect changes in that virtual texture and you have to upload always the whole file and users have to download it as well, so we were using multiple virtual textures in order to reduce this problem.

I am using unity 5.6.1p4

[Ricardo Teixeira]

Hi,

so I managed to find some solution. First I tried to delete and recteate VT with the same settings. It seemed that it solved the problem, but I am using 3 VTs and when I did the same for the second VT then the first one got corrupted and again half of the textures in that VT were not working. So after that I put all my materials/textures under one VT and now it works, howerver it is not practical since Steam is unable to detect changes in that virtual texture and you have to upload always the whole file and users have to download it as well, so we were using multiple virtual textures in order to reduce this problem.
I am using unity 5.6.1p4

Hello,

Thank you for the additional information, we really appreciate it.

First I tried to delete and recteate VT with the same settings. It seemed that it solved the problem, but I am using 3 VTs and when I did the same for the second VT then the first one got corrupted and again half of the textures in that VT were not working.

Were the Virtual Textures pointing to the same folder(s)? Using multiple virtual textures shouldn't be a problem, we encourage it, we would be happy to help identify and correct the issue.

So after that I put all my materials/textures under one VT and now it works, howerver it is not practical since Steam is unable to detect changes in that virtual texture and you have to upload always the whole file and users have to download it as well, so we were using multiple virtual textures in order to reduce this problem.

Using multiple virtual textures is definitely a good idea. Virtual Textures can be incrementally updated instead of rebuilding, that will ensure that your users only need to get the new content. Do note that the AT build option "Deployed Optimized "(occupies slightly less disk space) should be disabled if you intend to provide incremental updates to your users.

I'm not sure about the scope of your game but, as a general rule, be sure to sure to keep a Master project separate form your development station; this should ensure that you don't run into any issues regarding virtual texture updates.

Looking forward to your reply.

Thanks!

[PerunCreative]

Hi,

no they were pointing to different folders. There are only a few streamed textures which are used twice in different material. However the objects which were not streamed had definitely texture which is nowhere else.

Also I would like to report another bug. There is something wrong with Aniso Level on AMD GPUs. I was using amd rx460 and if the aniso level was higher than 3 there were some unsharpen spikes and if you were moving it was creating black flickering on the textures. With nvidia 1070 I have no issue with aniso. The rx460 has the latest drivers.

[Ricardo Teixeira]

Hello,

no they were pointing to different folders. There are only a few streamed textures which are used twice in different material. However the objects which were not streamed had definitely texture which is nowhere else.

Thank you for elaborating. That's odd, can you replicate and isolate the problem? We would be happy to debug it on our side.

Also I would like to report another bug. There is something wrong with Aniso Level on AMD GPUs. I was using amd rx460 and if the aniso level was higher than 3 there were some unsharpen spikes and if you were moving it was creating black flickering on the textures. With nvidia 1070 I have no issue with aniso. The rx460 has the latest drivers.

Thank you for reporting it, we will test it as soon as possible. Were you on OSX or Windows?

Thanks!

[Ricardo Teixeira]

Hi,

no they were pointing to different folders. There are only a few streamed textures which are used twice in different material. However the objects which were not streamed had definitely texture which is nowhere else.

Also I would like to report another bug. There is something wrong with Aniso Level on AMD GPUs. I was using amd rx460 and if the aniso level was higher than 3 there were some unsharpen spikes and if you were moving it was creating black flickering on the textures. With nvidia 1070 I have no issue with aniso. The rx460 has the latest drivers.

Hello,

Just a quick heads, we will only be able to tackle the aniso issue on Monday.

Regarding the virtual texture problem, did you end up deleting all the virtual textures? It would be great if we could try to replicate the issue, we would be more than happy to help you debug it. Rebuilding all VT's before using them should resolve the problem, as a last resort we could always try to delete the VT assets and the actual Cache located inside the Library folder.

If the problem persists, could you possible share a sample with the problem present?

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

[PerunCreative]

Hello,

I am using windows 10. I deleted all the virtual textures and replaced them with one VT, however this is still not 100% solution, because today I have discovered that few of the NPCs don't have correct textures (e.g. part of a building texture instead of hair texture etc.). Few examples:





After taking these pictures I wanted to show you how they should look without streaming. So I changed the amplify shader to unity's standard shader and here's what happend: amlify detected changes in the material and texture resizing information window came up. However after this the textures were not resized back at all. They remained at 64x64 resolution.



So I manually fixed the max size of the textures and the non-streamed character was then ok.



After this I wanted to try making it streamed again, but as a result I got that wrong glossy, golden texture like in the first picture. Strange was that the texture remained at 2048x2048 a didn't changed to 64x64 as other streamed textures. After some trials and errors I solve this by deleting the material and creating a new one with the exact settings.

But I am still unable to split that one big VT to multiple smaller ones. I tried to do complete clean up - I closed the unity, deleted the content of Library/AmplifyCache and all files related to amplify texture from assets (Assets/AmplifyTexture, Assets/Plugins and VT). After opening the editor the Amplify Texture - Asset Monitor Cache window came up and scanned all the texture and created a new file in the Library/AmplifyCache. After this I still tried to import the amplify, but the result in the end was exactly the same

Is the Asset Monitor stored somewhere else? Did I missed some folder which needs to be deleted or do I have to restart the computer before the opening unity after manually deleting all the files?

[Ricardo Teixeira]

Hello,

I am using windows 10. I deleted all the virtual textures and replaced them with one VT, however this is still not 100% solution, because today I have discovered that few of the NPCs don't have correct textures (e.g. part of a building texture instead of hair texture etc.). Few examples:





After taking these pictures I wanted to show you how they should look without streaming. So I changed the amplify shader to unity's standard shader and here's what happend: amlify detected changes in the material and texture resizing information window came up. However after this the textures were not resized back at all. They remained at 64x64 resolution.



So I manually fixed the max size of the textures and the non-streamed character was then ok.



After this I wanted to try making it streamed again, but as a result I got that wrong glossy, golden texture like in the first picture. Strange was that the texture remained at 2048x2048 a didn't changed to 64x64 as other streamed textures. After some trials and errors I solve this by deleting the material and creating a new one with the exact settings.

But I am still unable to split that one big VT to multiple smaller ones. I tried to do complete clean up - I closed the unity, deleted the content of Library/AmplifyCache and all files related to amplify texture from assets (Assets/AmplifyTexture, Assets/Plugins and VT). After opening the editor the Amplify Texture - Asset Monitor Cache window came up and scanned all the texture and created a new file in the Library/AmplifyCache. After this I still tried to import the amplify, but the result in the end was exactly the same

Is the Asset Monitor stored somewhere else? Did I missed some folder which needs to be deleted or do I have to restart the computer before the opening unity after manually deleting all the files?

Hello,

Thank you for the additional information, we really appreciate it. That's definitely not supposed to happen but I can't say that I know for sure what's causing it.

Deleting the Cache folder and the Virtual Textures should be sufficient. We need to know more about your project in order to debug the problem.

-How many virtual texture assets do you currently have in your project?
-Does Forcing a Material Update in your current virtual texture not help at all?
-Can you share a sample with the problem present?

Thanks!

[PerunCreative]

Hi,

currently there is only one virtual texture. I haven't tried forced update, but I will try that and let you know if it helped. I am not sure about how to get that sample to you because, the project is huge (~100GB). If the force material update won't be successful I will try to make a lightweight version with necessary minimum.

If you don't mind I have few questions which are not related to this problem. Do you have any plans/ETA for dx12 or vulkan support? Unity's Vulkan implementation is quite unstable right now, but dx12 runs well in the latest unity versions.

We would like to use amplify texture for more efficient texture atlasing in order to reduce material count, so correct me if I am mistaken, but for AT there is no performance difference between multiple 4k textures and one 8k, because in the end they are all in one big virtual texture and the amplified shader takes the mesh uv and works with that small portion of the texture, so using one 8k atlas which combines multiple 4k textures will have no negative impact during the fragment shader since it will sample only that 4k texture defined by UVs and it won't be sampling 8k texture. Am I right or amplify texture works differently?

Also would it be possible to add something like texture quality in unity's quality settings? I mean that now the objects near you are getting the full source texture quality (4k), but if you have a small VRAM (1GB) then other objects which won't fit in to the memory get the lowest quality which leads to frequent reloading, so it would be good if you could limit the max texture quality which you can get (half -> 2k instead of 4k etc.) and thanks to this the objects wouldn't look that nice, but it would take less vram and therefor the loading/streaming would be less noticeable on slower computers and you could still have that full quality for faster PCs/Consoles