Umbra (3D technology company)

Last updated

Umbra
Company type Subsidiary
Industry Video games
Founded in Helsinki, Finland
HeadquartersHelsinki
Parent Amazon
Website umbra3d.com

Umbra is a graphics software technology company founded 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. Umbra specializes in occlusion culling, visibility solution technology and provides middleware for video games running on Windows, Linux, iOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U, handheld consoles, and other platforms. In 2021, Amazon acquired Umbra.

Contents

Umbra provides the occlusion culling system for the Unity game engine since the Unity 3 release. [1]

Umbra is also available as a plug-in for Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Engine 4. [2]

Umbra's technology is used in many major video games such as Batman: Arkham Knight, Call of Duty: Ghosts, [3] The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Destiny, Until Dawn, Killzone: Shadow Fall, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Guild Wars 2, RaiderZ, The Secret World, Lord of the Rings Online, Planetside 2, Alan Wake, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Grandia Online, EVE Online, Free Realms, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age II, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and DOOM.

Umbra's technology has been licensed for use in video games by Rocksteady, Bungie, Guerrilla Games, CD Projekt, Microsoft Studios, Team Dakota, Neversoft, Infinity Ward, Shanda, Vicarious Visions, Specular Interactive, Remedy, Red Duck Inc., Splash Damage, Softmax and several others.

History

Umbra was spun off from Hybrid Graphics in 2005. Umbra acquired Hybrid Graphics' dPVS and continued its development. The next generation of this technology, named Umbra, was a hardware accelerated occlusion culling middleware. Umbra was released in September 2007. In 2009, Umbra Occlusion Booster was released, and it was optimized for multi-core systems such as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

In 2011 Umbra mostly concentrated on developing Umbra 3. The solution offers performance optimization by optimizing critical parts of a game such as rendering and by providing tools to help with content streaming and game logic. Umbra 3 builds an internal representation of a game scene and uses this data at runtime to perform efficient queries that can be used to e.g. determine the set of visible objects for the player or determine the set of objects that are within a given distance from a point. The difference from past versions is that Umbra 3 has a pre-process stage where it compiles the visibility data which is then used at runtime to perform visibility-related queries. A new feature in 2012 is the streaming functionality allowing building of visibility data at runtime.

In March 2010, Unity Technologies announced that the next release of Unity would feature built-in occlusion culling preprocessing powered by Umbra. It first appeared in Unity 3. [4] Prior to Unity 5's release Umbra's occlusion culling solution was available only with paid Pro licenses.

Edge Magazine's website next-generation.biz reported on 15 December 2011 that Umbra's technology is an integral part of Bungie's new 3D engine and game. [5]

ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 was released on 28 August and the game uses Umbra 3. [6]

On 14 August 2012, Umbra announced its partnership with Nintendo which allows the licensing of the Umbra 3 middleware for Wii U developers.

At the Game Developers Conference 2014 Umbra announced Umbra for Cloud [7] and Umbra VR. The latter is based on Umbra's Stereo Camera feature which the company explains allows that "both eyes can use the results of a single occlusion culling operation – effectively halving the required processing time." [8]

On 3 April 2014, Umbra announced that its latest technology was licensed by Wargaming to be used as part of the graphical upgrade being made to World of Tanks. The deal also allows other Wargaming studios to use Umbra's Visibility Technology. [9]

In January 2021, Amazon announced its acquisition of Umbra. [10]

Products

Umbra has developed two products: Umbra Occlusion Booster and Umbra 3.

Umbra Occlusion Booster is GPU accelerated occlusion culling middleware for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This product was released in 2009.

Umbra 3.2 was released on 1 February 2013. The "next-generation" update has several important new features such as streaming which enables streaming open worlds, shadow and light culling as well as hierarchical occluder data which also helps open world performance.

Umbra 3.3 was released on 11 August 2013.

In February 2015, Umbra announced Umbra Cloud and rebranded both the product and the company as simply Umbra. [11]

dPVS

dPVS is an advanced computer graphics visibility optimization tool. Designed for developing games with large and dynamic [3D] worlds, dPVS computes visibility databases in real time. dPVS also reduces the time required for static PVS computation.

Originally started at Hybrid Graphics, under the name SurRender Umbra, it was the topic of Timo Aila's Master's Thesis, [12] with the collaboration of Ville Miettinen (who was one of the developers of their SurRender engine.) Because of its continuing development, and also to help distinguish that it was not dependent on the SurRender engine, it was renamed dPVS. The technology was eventually spun off into its own company, Umbra Software Ltd.

Related Research Articles

A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games and generally includes relevant libraries and support programs such as a level editor. The "engine" terminology is akin to the term "software engine" used more widely in the software industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hidden-surface determination</span> Visibility in 3D computer graphics

In 3D computer graphics, hidden-surface determination is the process of identifying what surfaces and parts of surfaces can be seen from a particular viewing angle. A hidden-surface determination algorithm is a solution to the visibility problem, which was one of the first major problems in the field of 3D computer graphics. The process of hidden-surface determination is sometimes called hiding, and such an algorithm is sometimes called a hider. When referring to line rendering it is known as hidden-line removal. Hidden-surface determination is necessary to render a scene correctly, so that one may not view features hidden behind the model itself, allowing only the naturally viewable portion of the graphic to be visible.

RenderWare is a video game engine developed by British game developer Criterion Software.

Hybrid Graphics Ltd., commonly referred to as Hybrid Graphics, was a graphics software technology company active from 1994 to 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. Acquired by Nvidia in 2006, Hybrid Graphics is now Nvidia Corporation's Helsinki office.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CryEngine</span> Game engine by Crytek

CryEngine is a game engine designed by the German game developer Crytek. It has been used in all of their titles with the initial version being used in Far Cry, and continues to be updated to support new consoles and hardware for their games. It has also been used for many third-party games under Crytek's licensing scheme, including Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 and SNOW. Warhorse Studios uses a modified version of the engine for their medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Ubisoft maintains an in-house, heavily modified version of CryEngine from the original Far Cry called the Dunia Engine, which is used in their later iterations of the Far Cry series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PhysX</span> Realtime physics engine software

PhysX is an open-source realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by Nvidia as a part of Nvidia GameWorks software suite.

Clipping, in the context of computer graphics, is a method to selectively enable or disable rendering operations within a defined region of interest. Mathematically, clipping can be described using the terminology of constructive geometry. A rendering algorithm only draws pixels in the intersection between the clip region and the scene model. Lines and surfaces outside the view volume are removed.

In computer-generated imagery and real-time 3D computer graphics, portal rendering is an algorithm for visibility determination. For example, consider a 3D computer game environment, which may contain many polygons, only a few of which may be visible on screen at a given time. By determining which polygons are currently not visible, and not rendering those objects, significant performance improvements can be achieved.

SpeedTree is a group of vegetation programming and modeling software products developed and sold by Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. (IDV) that generates virtual foliage for animations, architecture and in real time for video games and demanding real time simulations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unity (game engine)</span> Cross-platform video game and simulation engine

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a variety of desktop, mobile, console, augmented reality, and virtual reality platforms. It is particularly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development, is considered easy to use for beginner developers, and is popular for indie game development.

In 3D computer graphics, Potentially Visible Sets are used to accelerate the rendering of 3D environments. They are a form of occlusion culling, whereby a candidate set of potentially visible polygons are pre-computed, then indexed at run-time in order to quickly obtain an estimate of the visible geometry. The term PVS is sometimes used to refer to any occlusion culling algorithm, although in almost all the literature, it is used to refer specifically to occlusion culling algorithms that pre-compute visible sets and associate these sets with regions in space. In order to make this association, the camera's view-space is typically subdivided into regions and a PVS is computed for each region.

MT Framework is a game engine created by Capcom. "MT" stands for "Multi-Thread", "Meta Tools" and "Multi-Target". While initially MT Framework was intended to power 2006's Dead Rising and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition only, Capcom later decided for their internal development divisions to adopt it as their default engine. As a result, the vast majority of their internally developed video games for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms were created on it, including four new titles and three remastered ports of past titles in the Resident Evil series. The visuals of the first games built with the engine were well received, and MT Framework has also won a CEDEC award.

Simplygon is 3D computer graphics software for automatic 3D optimization, based on proprietary methods for creating levels of detail (LODs) through Polygon mesh reduction and other optimization techniques.

Ville Ilmari Miettinen is a Finnish serial entrepreneur and computer programmer. Miettinen was the co-founder and CTO of Hybrid Graphics, a graphics technology company acquired by NVIDIA in 2006. Miettinen is a founding partner at Lots, one of the accelerators in the Finnish governmental Vigo Programme. Miettinen is also the CEO and co-founder of the crowdsourcing technology company Microtask.

Silicon Studio Corporation is a Japanese computer graphics technology company and HR services provider based in Tokyo. As a technology development company, Silicon Studio has produced several products in the 3D computer graphics field, including middleware software, such as a post-processing visual effects library YEBIS, real-time global illumination technology, such as Enlighten, and Mizuchi, a physically based rendering engine. As a video game developer, Silicon Studio has worked on many different titles for several gaming platforms, most notably, the action-adventure game 3D Dot Game Heroes on the PlayStation 3, the role-playing video games Bravely Default and Bravely Second: End Layer on the Nintendo 3DS, and Fantasica on the iOS and Android mobile platforms.

Autodesk Gameware is a discontinued middleware software suite developed by Autodesk. The suite contained tools that enable designers to create game lighting, character animation, low level path finding, high-level AI and advanced user interfaces. On July 12, 2017, Autodesk removed Scaleform, Beast, HumanIK, and Navigation from their online store, and announced the ending of support for the products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scaleform GFx</span> Discontinued game development middleware package

Scaleform GFx is a discontinued game development middleware package, a vector graphics rendering engine used to display Adobe Flash-based user interfaces and HUDs for video games. In March 2011, Autodesk acquired Scaleform Corporation and Scaleform GFx became part of the Autodesk Gameware line of middleware. On July 12, 2018, Autodesk discontinued Scaleform GFx, and it is no longer available for purchase.

Luminous Engine, originally called Luminous Studio, is a multi-platform game engine developed and used internally by Square Enix and later on by Luminous Productions. The engine was developed for and targeted at eighth-generation hardware and DirectX 11-compatible platforms, such as Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and versions of Microsoft Windows. It was conceived during the development of Final Fantasy XIII-2 to be compatible with next generation consoles that their existing platform, Crystal Tools, could not handle.

This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RenderDoc</span> Open source frame debugger

RenderDoc is a free and open source frame debugger that can be used to analyze single frames generated by other software programs such as games. RenderDoc can provide in-depth analysis of single frames from any application that uses Vulkan, D3D11, OpenGL & OpenGL ES, or D3D12. RenderDoc also allows the user to manipulate a captured frame to inspect different things such as pipeline stage, commands, texture maps, models, assets, and more. RenderDoc can also capture assets outside the view of the game's camera. RenderDoc supports analyzing frame rendering costs on the graphics processing unit.

References

  1. Kristyna Hougaard (26 December 2013). "Occlusion Culling in Unity 4.3: Best Practices". Unity Blog. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  2. Will Freeman (6 June 2013). "Epic unveils Unreal Engine 4 Integrated Partners Program". MCV. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  3. "Call of Duty: Ghosts powers up with Umbra 3 (updated)" (Press release). www.umbra3d.com. 7 November 2013. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  4. "Unity Technologies Unveils Third Generation of Its Powerful Development Platform". Unity. 8 March 2010. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  5. "Middleware deal sheds light on new Bungie Engine". Edge Magazine. Archived from the original on 27 June 2012. Retrieved 15 December 2011.
  6. Matt Liebl (13 August 2012). "Guild Wars 2 using Umbra 3". GameZone. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  7. "Umbra Dev: Cloud Computing on Xbox One and PS4 "Makes Very Dynamic and Massive Worlds a Reality"".
  8. Ben Lang (8 May 2014). "Umbra Software Positions Occlusion Culling Tech for 120 FPS VR Gaming" . Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  9. "World of Tanks Upgrades to the Umbra 3 Visibility Solution". Gamasutra (Press release). 3 April 2014. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  10. "Startupit | Amazon osti suomalaisen ohjelmistoyhtiön – Moni maailman tunnetuimmista pelisarjoista käyttää Umbran 3d-mallinnusta" [Amazon bought a Finnish software company - Many of the world's most famous game series use Umbra's 3D modeling]. Helsingin Sanomat (in Finnish). 22 January 2021. Retrieved 22 January 2021.
  11. "Umbra Cloud announcement". Umbra. 26 February 2015. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  12. SurRender Umbra: A Visibility Determination Framework for Dynamic Environments Retrieved 08 April 2023.