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Roadmap 2012


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Render

  • Improved support of large open spaces for flight simulators.
  • New forest and vegetation rendering system.
  • Night sky system (with moon and stars).
  • Improved daytime sky system.
  • Weather effects (wet and snow post-processes).
  • Rivers simulation system (flowing water included).
  • Spline-based roads system.

High-level systems

  • Tracker (sequencer) system used to multi-track control of virtually all parameters in the scene:
    • arbitrary animation by splines
    • arbitrary animation by color gradients
    • animation of environment parameters
    • enabling/disabling of nodes
    • movement of nodes
    • changing of almost all node parameters
    • switching of materials
    • changing of parameters, states and textures for materials
    • and so on

Tools

  • New multi-window UnigineEditor.
  • Full integration of Skinner animation system into UnigineEditor.
  • Full integration of Schemer flowgraph system into UnigineEditor.
  • Full integration of Tracker sequencer system into UnigineEditor.
  • New assets management system.
  • Direct editing of Grass and Terrain masks in UnigineEditor.
  • Object brushes (direct editing of Clutter masks).
  • Import/export of geometry and animation data from/to FBX format.
  • Improved support of COLLADA format (animation import).
  • Plug-in system for UnigineEditor (to easily extend the editor with custom features).

Platforms

  • Windows 8 on x86 and ARM.
  • Linux on ARM.
  • Improvements in mobile space:
    • Support of NVIDIA Tegra 3.
    • Improved support of Imagination Technology mobile processors (PowerVR).
    • Improved support of Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno.

    [*]Xbox 360 (to be confirmed).

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Render

  • New forest and vegetation rendering system.
  • Night sky system (with moon and stars).
  • Improved daytime sky system.
  • Weather effects (wet and snow post-processes).
  • Rivers simulation system (flowing water included).

 

Thanks for the roadmap!

 

Sounds good, I think we can enhanced our scenes a lot with this. Stars were pain in the ass to implement on a texture. (morphing)

What means "New forest and vegetation rendering system", we are currently build our forest with node references (no cluster/clutter), are there any changes directly to the "nodes" or is it a better speedtree integration or additional configuration possibilities? Are there any changes to the ObjectGrass class? We are not so happy with the performance decrease when using it.

 

In the roadmap for 2011 was Improved character system as much as I know this was never implemented? Are there any plans for it? We froze the development for the character system the last year to wait for this change to be implemented. When there are no plans we can unfreeze the development for character related stuff.

 

Sadly the tracker comes such late, we are implementing such a framework since some months for these needs. (Changing for everything based on time, month, season and weather).

 

We are a very little customer (and less important) but I would be nice to have some more "information" whats is developed and what are the plans. We did some work and some releases later Unigine has implemented it. (This is for us a bad situation, while we are a very small team, we depend on every hour worked on the project, and we can save a lot of time when there are more information what the SDK will provide in the future.)

 

A last question, are there any plans to improve the GUI-Layer?

 

Happy New Year

Manuel

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Sounds good, but why such a advanced engine don't have multi-threaded rendering in directx11?

 

and another question, seems unigine did use geometry shader, but what if unigine use geometry shader to optimize PSSM shadow pass, some articles showed how to render CSM/PSSM's shadow in one pass with geometry shader.

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Sounds good, but why such a advanced engine don't have multi-threaded rendering in directx11?

Most probably this would mean a big change of the overall DX11 render architecture which is not compatible with all other supported platforms. That's the general dilemma with a multi-multi-platform engine targeting low- to-high-end-systems.

 

seems unigine did use geometry shader, but what if unigine use geometry shader to optimize PSSM shadow pass, some articles showed how to render CSM/PSSM's shadow in one pass with geometry shader.

UNIGINE used geometry shaders for such kind of optimization under DX10/11 sine 2008, but having a look into the current shader sources it seems to have gone...

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UNIGINE used geometry shaders for such kind of optimization under DX10/11 sine 2008, but having a look into the current shader sources it seems to have gone...

 

So, I'm not the only one found this basic feature missing in such a advanced real-time engine...

 

and to the DX11 stuff, I really don't think a advanced real-time engine should support a very old hardware, at the end of 2012, unigine should think of dropping DX9, it's old enough...

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So, I'm not the only one found this basic feature missing in such a advanced real-time engine...

If I can remember it right, the increase of performance by geometry shader based PSSM was not really impressive. Sometimes some technical GPU features are simply hyped by HW vendors for marketing reasons but do not provide dramatic benefits in practice. Same might be true for your mentioned multi-threaded DX11 render context feature. Based on DICE comments on this topic for their Frostbite 2 engine they had all kinds of troubles with render stalls due to insufficient driver support (although they were able to solve these issues together with NVIDIA/AMD).

 

Also a real performance boost most of the time requires a complete re-design of the engine architecture including drop of legacy support and specialization on specific platform for beeing able to fully use all available features which is hard for a multi-purpose game engine.

 

and to the DX11 stuff, I really don't think a advanced real-time engine should support a very old hardware, at the end of 2012, unigine should think of dropping DX9, it's old enough...

This general discussion has been part of Unigine-SDK-2011-11-11 release forum thread and pros and cons of legacy/multi-multi-platform support have been lively discussed there. I have a personal gut feeling about it, but I think for a game engine provider it's quite hard in the current market situation to predict the most promissing approach for long-term business success.

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The increasing of performance of using geometry shader replication for PSSM is negative. Because of that geometry shader replication was removed. Multi-threaded rendering doesn't improve performance when we GPU limited (present time is positive). All modern video drivers perform rendering in the parallel thread with 2-3 frames delay.

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Hi Binstream, this is great to see at last, however it does not help us in making decisions on what to work on as far as editor enhancements go for our March deadline, as there are no dates mentioned on any of these features.

 

As far as importance to us, we need the following before the end of March:

  • Improved support of large open spaces for flight simulators. (although in our case rail simulators)
  • New forest and vegetation rendering system.
  • Night sky system (with moon and stars).
  • Improved daytime sky system.
  • Weather effects (wet and snow post-processes).
  • Spline-based roads system.
  • Direct editing of Grass and Terrain masks in UnigineEditor.

  • Object brushes (direct editing of Clutter masks).
  • Import/export of geometry and animation data from/to FBX format.

Can you please comment on which of these may be ready before the end of march and what the priorities are? this will ensure we do not waste time developing things that may already be added by your team.

 

Thanks very much for the update.

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The following systems will be implemented before the end of march:

  • New forest and vegetation rendering system.
  • Night sky system (with moon and stars).
  • Improved daytime sky system.
  • Weather effects (wet and snow post-processes).
  • Tracker (sequencer) system used to multi-track control of virtually all parameters in the scene.

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Sounds promissing. Just as a thought: shouldn't Tracker better be named Sequencer directly (instead explaining it in brackets) as it much better expresses its task ?

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  • New forest and vegetation rendering system.

any detailed information about this? Our next few scene depends on this.

 

We will provide a tool to grab a tree into the impostor atlas (diffuse and normal). New shader for ObjectGrass will select most appropriate tree image from atlas and render it. WorldClutter and ObjectGrass will work in together to create forest with high quality closest and distant trees.

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New shader for ObjectGrass will select most appropriate tree image from atlas and render it. WorldClutter and ObjectGrass will work in together to create forest with high quality closest and distant trees.

 

I assume WorldClutter and ObjectGrass will use same automatic instance X/Y placement algorithm based on mask/density texture, right ? Will there be some smooth fading support for mesh-impostor transition ?

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by using a tool to grab the atlas is good for hand making trees, but we use speedtree to model the trees, and I also believe Woody3d is a far more cheaper vegitation modeler software compared to speedtree. both these tools provided a generated texture atlas, So I hope there will be some api avaliable to us, which can specify the impostor's uv in atlas and using specifid atlas texture.

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by using a tool to grab the atlas is good for hand making trees, but we use speedtree to model the trees, and I also believe Woody3d is a far more cheaper vegitation modeler software compared to speedtree. both these tools provided a generated texture atlas, So I hope there will be some api avaliable to us, which can specify the impostor's uv in atlas and using specifid atlas texture.

 

I am quite sure that impostor texture atlas layout, uv + normal data encoding are highly vendor-specific and also require compatible shaders for propper data decoding during runtime. Instead I would assume e.g. for SpeedTree the following workflow:

  • tree modell creation with SpeedTree modeling tool
  • export of SpeedTree runtime format ( If I remember right *.srt file and texture atlas)
  • tree mesh and material conversion to Unigine mesh/material via Unigine SpeedTree plugin
  • impostor texture atlas creation with new Unigine atlas grabing tool
  • Unigine mesh/atlas usage with new ObjectGrass impostor shaders

Interesting point would be the planed support for tree LOD's (wich can also be generated with SpeedTree modeller). Best approach woud be to use highest tree mesh LOD for impostor rendering, so the transition from least complex geometry to impostor representation shows no significant popping. This of course requires matching/maybe even better slightly overlapping WorldClutter max distance /ObjectGrass min distance settings and some elegant blending/dissolve effect. Quite sure that frustrum will find a nice solution

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ulf, you always saying that speedtree is far more expensive software, have you checked Woody3D? A $199 software for realtime vegitation modeling and rendering engine? they both using similar workflow.

 

and using your workflow is too complex, speedtree compiler support two kind of texture atlas creation:

  1. merging to leaves/fronds/caps atlas texture
  2. create a seperate billborard atlas texture

(I believe Woody3D also support these two type of atlas texture generating) in both ways, they use lowest LOD level to create a billboard texture for smooth mesh-to-billborad transition. and It can also specifiy wether or not to generate overhead billboard and number of vertical billboard.

 

 

 

and currently, I've modified engine to directly load srt trees into ObjectMeshDynamic, with over 2000 trees, ObjectMeshDynamic have almost same performance than ObjectMesh. ( Of course, I need WorldCluster, otherwise the rendering performance was.... below 50 fps on a GTX 570 ).

 

And for a better lod transition, I think SpeedTree's way is best, they shrink higher LOD's leaves to 0-size, and meantime they grow the lower LOD's leaves from 0-size to normal size, this is better than alpha transition.

 

And another thing, speedtree's sdk allows user to access everything in srt files, includeing pos, uv, normal, tangent, detail uv, wind data, lod transition, ambient occlusion, and others. so I'm only asking unigine to expose those api for filling the data into unigine format.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Woody 3D is Windows / Mac only, it doesn't export to anything, but into the internal format.

 

Although, why do we need Woody3D or SpeedTree if Unigine has it's own vegetation system?

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F or tree model creation based on some include tools or simply for usage of bundled tree libraries. Nevertheless there are other sources for good vegetation assets, so these might be already sufficient for most users.

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