Umbra announced today a new version of its rendering middleware which is used in such video games as Call of Duty:Advanced Warfare, Destiny, Quantum Break and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. As the press release reads, the latest version of Umbra comes with two significant new features.
The Umbra Cloud performs the geometry processing in the cloud instead of locally, and thus offers near-unlimited computation and storage capabilities. The Umbra runtime can then use the cloud-generated data exactly as if it were created locally. The Umbra Cloud license makes it possible for smaller teams to take advantage of Umbra’s powerful capabilities. The Umbra Cloud is already being utilized by developers.
Jani Joki, Director of Engineering at Futuremark, said:
“With Umbra Cloud, we have access to a cost-effective and extremely scalable computation infrastructure with zero setup effort. It has accelerated our work-flow as we develop our next generation of 3DMark benchmark tests.”
Existing customers get access to the Cloud version of Umbra.
The Umbra Debugger is a modern GUI tool for programmers and artists to visualize how Umbra’s visibility system works with their content. The software allows for rapid prototyping and quick debugging.
Otso Mäkinen, Chief Technology Officer of Umbra, added:
“Improved usability and performance are our themes for this year. The addition of cloud computation allows even smaller teams to create large game worlds. The Debugger is a powerful new tool which developers can utilize to use and understand the inner workings of Umbra better.”
Umbra creates an optimized database from your 3D data, whether it is a small game level or a huge architectural model. Umbra processes your data automatically, which means you can give Umbra your geometry as-is without modifying it in any way, or doing any extra work.
Umbra’s optimized database can then be used in an application to perform queries. The queries answer questions like “what can be seen here?” or “what needs to be rendered next?”.
Umbra runs on virtually any modern CPU and does not depend on any specific hardware or external software. All computers, mobile devices and gaming consoles are supported. Umbra is part of Unity and available as a plug-in for Unreal Engine 4.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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