Unigine Corp. introduces the full support of DirectX 11 features in its top-notch 3D middleware. Updated Unigine engine has successfully incorporated the groundbreaking DirectX 11 capabilities, including the following core features:
- Hardware tessellation
- DirectCompute
- Shader Model 5.0
Hardware tessellation is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality is vivified at your fingertips delivering engaging gaming experience. Due to the well-designed DirectX 11 API and extensible architecture of the Unigine engine support of this feature was added in less than a month.
Tessellation opens a whole new road of opportunities, but it is untrodden so far. This technology challenges the artists to approach the task of content creation from a different perspective. Unigine team took a lot of effort scrupulously researching this matter and improving the toolset for easy and trouble-free usage. With Unigine engine enhancing the image quality by means of tessellation is given just the green light.
DirectCompute is a crunch numbers technology designed to deal with heavy computational tasks easily. Some of Unigine postprocesses (including glow, HDR and SSAO) has been migrated to DirectCompute with considerable gain in performance.
The extended set of instructions in Shader Model 5.0 leverages easy creation of complex shader effects for Unigine-based projects. This technology is fully supported now, i.e. all of the six types of shaders are available: vertex, hull, domain, geometry, pixel and compute. SM 5.0 serves as a spring-board for strikingly realistic VFXs reinforcing the feeling of immersion.
"As Unigine is always on the frontier of advanced 3D real-time technologies, we couldn't have missed the next major stage of DirectX development. DirectX 11 unveils a set of breakthrough features both in graphics and GP-GPU fields, and shatters the limits set for PC gaming. Zero-overhead context switching for DirectCompute makes it possible to calculate virtually everything by their means, so I expect the faster physics simulation, cinematic special effects of dramatic impact and breathtaking water simulation to be implemented via this technology. HW tessellation empowers developers to create ultra-realistic scenes complete in every detail with the aid of Unigine engine. I'm anxious to see the brave new titles released basing on DirectX 11." // Alexander Zaprjagaev, CTO of Unigine Corp.
Overview
Unigine™ is a top-notch technology, that can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of our customers claim that they have never seen such an extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. It is already used in the development of different projects (mostly games).
Technology Excellence
Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:
- Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
- Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
- Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
- Multicore CPU support
- Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
- Powerful C++ API
- Comprehensive performance profiling system
- Flexible XML-based data structures
Photorealistic Graphics
A picture paints a thousand words. With Unigine your scenes will look photorealistic.
Unigine provides the most advanced rendering features ever supported by the graphics hardware. The highly-optimized renderer ensures superior image quality and great performance.
All modern features are supported by the Unigine renderer:
- Per-pixel dynamic lighting
- Normal & parallax occlusion mapping
- 64-bit HDR rendering
- Volumetric fog and light
- Powerful particle systems: fire, smoke, explosions
- Extensible set of shaders (GLSL / HLSL)
- Postprocessing: depth of field, refraction, glow, blurring, color correction and much more.
Besides that, there is a set of the hottest technologies provided by Unigine:
- Shader Model 5.0 support
- Hardware tessellation
- SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
- Unique materials system with parameter hierarchy support
- Special materials for vegetation
- Dynamic irradiance environment maps
- Live water with a surf zone and caustics
- Native support of stereo 3D devices
Moreover, Unigine 1.0 supports six generations of GPUs: from NV30 / R300 to the newest ones, so it's extremely scalable. Being a registered developer of NVIDIA and AMD (formely ATI) we work closely with hardware vendors to obtain the best results.
Live Physics
Would you like to interact with a virtual world as with the real one? Here is a fast and robust physics module for this:
- Rigid body physics
- Rag doll physics
- Particle system physics
- Destroyable joints
- Various vehicles
- Time reverse feature
Multi-threaded physics core of Unigine is highly optimized and can work in parallel with other subsystems on multicore platforms. Per-object tuning capabilities allow fine control over performance.
Powerful Scripting
UnigineScript is a scripting language used by the Unigine engine, it provides the following key features:
- Object-oriented programming
- Easy to learn language (similar to C++ in syntax)
- Transparent interconnection with external C++ objects
- Built-in fast 3D math (vectors, matrices, and quaternions with all corresponding functions)
- Built-in debugger and performance profiler
- Well-documented standart library (more than 3000 functions out-of-the box)
UnigineScript is very powerful, for example, our visual editor is written completely by means of scripting. There is a virtual machine with full state saving and restoring under the hood that is very fast owing to efficient byte-code compiler and optimizer.
Graphic User Interface
Unigine provides a fully capable GUI module:
- Comprehensive set of widgets, containers and dialogs
- 3D effects, transparency, animation
- Easy-to-use UI files in the XML format
- Skins support
- Support of Eastern languages
- Localization packs support
This module is used to build all interfaces of Unigine tools, so their look and feel are platform-independent. Moreover, an interactive 3D GUI can be placed into a virtual world even on arbitrary curved surfaces.
3D Sound
Fill your virtual environment with various sounds and music:
- Volumetric sound system
- Streaming playback support
- EAX support
- Interconnection with physics events
Ready to Use Objects
There are a lot of base objects available in Unigine, including:
- Animated meshes with animation blending support
- Dynamic mesh (generated on-the-fly)
- Billboards
- Dynamic volumetric objects
- Characters
Easy-to-Use Tools
Unigine toolset forms a compete content pipeline:
- Robust export/import plugins for 3ds Max and Maya
- Fast mesh/animation viewer
- Normal map generator and combiner
- Generator of ambient occlusion maps
- Terrain editor
- Batch image converter with high-quality algorithm of DXT compression
- Data encryption tool
All of these tools can be easily integrated with processes of the specific project due to their high flexibility.
UnigineEditor
UnigineEditor is a main tool for editing Unigine-based virtual worlds. It is a WYSIWYG editor, so you can instantly see changes in your scene.
- Managing objects, effects and lights
- Editing physics properties
- Fine tuning of the rendering settings
- Material editor with hierarchy support
- Different viewing modes for content optimization
- Built-in performance profiler
- Zero compile time
This fast to learn visual editor can be easily extended to meet project-specific needs.
About Unigine Engine
Unigine engine provides photorealistic 3D render, powerful physics module, object-oriented scripting system with a very rich library (more than 3000 methods out-of-the box), full-featured GUI module, sound subsystem, and a set of flexible tools. Efficient and well-architected framework supporting multi-core systems makes Unigine a highly scalable solution, on which multi-platform games with different hardware requirements can be based. Currently both the engine and the toolset are available for Windows and Linux platforms. This feature-rich middleware is successfully used in various VR projects as well as in modern games of different genres.
About Unigine Corp.
Unigine Corp. is an international company focused on top-notch real-time 3D solutions. The development studio is located in Tomsk, Russia. Main activity of Unigine Corp. is development of Unigine, a cross-platform engine for virtual 3D worlds. Since the project start in 2004, it attracts attention of different companies and groups of independent developers, because Unigine is always on the cutting edge of real-time 3D visualization and physics simulation technologies.
Unigine Corp. is a registered developer of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (previously ATI Technologies Inc.), NVIDIA Corporation and Creative Labs Inc. Being a registered developer the company works closely with hardware vendors in order to provide the best level of performance and stability of its products.
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