Community Forum

. Dear developer,

This release has certainly seen its share of delays. Mostly because in the past months we've had to accept contract work in order to support the company. However, because of your overwhelming support this year, we have been able to finally focus 100% on our products. The entire time we've been working behind the scenes, gathering information from our customers, designing and shaping Amplify Texture to fulfil your needs. We thank you for this opportunity and assure you that we intend to ship nothing short of a solid, full-featured, time saving product.

This first development build (devbuild1/db1), however, is not the most stable or feature rich. So we ask for your understanding and recommend that you only try it to check on our progress. We do not recommend any type of serious production using this version.

Here are the changes introduced in AT2 v2.0.1 aka db1:

• Requirements
  • Unity 4.3.3+
  
  Changes
  • Virtual textures now up to 2M x 2M
  • Per-material occlusion and displacement textures
  • Virtualized displacement on DX11 tessellation
  • Optional cache DXT compression
  • Multi-Tile UVs / Texture Grids
  • Mari UDIM support via Texture Grids
  • Unity Terrain support via custom material; basic shaders included
  • Improved streaming performance
  • Deprecated VT Scene/Project Context
  • New material folder based workflow
  
  Issues
  • OpenGL and DX11 not working yet
  • Multiple Camera/Runtime currently broken
  • DXT cache compression is low quality (WIP)
  • Crash when building with tile size of 512 x 512

Some notes on this release:

• Please note that the workflow has changed
  Although not yet final, which represents a big departure from AT1. The "Project/Scene context" setting are now gone. Instead, now you can provide a list of folders where AT2 will search for materials specifically for each VT. Folders can also be shared between VTs and when this happens, the material textures will be duplicated on both. By default, the entire "Assets" folder is added, including subdirectories, and so it represents the legacy "Project context" VT behaviour in AT1. As such, we encourage you to organize your material folders according to target VT.
  
  VTs are now checked for incremental changes/builds when the user hits Save
  In AT1 we were constantly checking for changed which caused lag in the editor. This will be the default behaviour going forward. In coming devbuilds we will introduce an intermediate stage for textures that are marked to be added to the VT but haven't been processed yet. This state will be reversible before triggering a VT build. This should also save you some headaches.
  
  Larger virtual textures like 1M x 1M and 2M x 2M require larger tiles
  Which may introduce additional runtime overhead. We recommend using multiple smaller VTs instead, for mainstream hardware, and larger ones only for high-end applications.
  
  We'll be delivering DX11 and OpenGL (OSX) support in devbuild2
  Along with fixes for all the other known issues.
  
  Some of the UI is disabled or unfinished
  Most of the work went into the backend and some UI decisions are still pending. We'll be unveiling more functionality and features as we go.

We'd also like to leave a bit of a teaser about what's coming next. The following will add to the features you already know and expect from AT2:

• Support for up to 16 Virtual Textures simultaneously on the same scene
  This feature will be introduced to make it easier to work with large data sets. We know that having a lot of textures on a single VT can be troublesome and builds sometime fail. You'll be able to: e.g. use one VT for buildings, one for characters, one for terrain, etc..
  
  No reason to pack all your data in the same container anymore. Not only will we encourage using multiple VTs, we'll also ensure that performance is only marginally affected by taking advantage of this feature. The gains will greatly outweigh the cost.
  
  Since we now support single VTs up to 2M x 2M, this means AT2 will end up supporting 64 Terapixel, of addressable texture space for a single camera, instead of the 4 Terapixel we promised for release. That should be enough to map the entire Earth's surface at a density of roughly 3 meters per pixel.
  
  Alloy Physical Shader Framework
  We're working with Rust Ltd to deliver out-of-the-box support for Alloy.
  
  We also plan to roll out Virtual Texture layout presets
  While the our layout isn't completely configurable, it's flexible enough to allow a variety of different layout presets to support custom textures like the ones used in Alloy or Marmoset. We'll keep extending these presets, even after the release, to support integration with a number of different 3rdparty vendors

We invite you to participate and help us shape this product.

Your feedback is very important to us.