Ricardo Teixeira from Amplify Creations discussed the technology behind Amplify Texture and shared some of the ways this new tool can help you build bigger and more realistic spaces with beautiful materials.

Amplify Texture is still in development, not all features are currently available. We recently added support for Android devices but its current performance is not representative of the final product, there’s still much room for improvement.

Anyone can try the fully functional Desktop and Mobile (Android Beta) trial version for Unity today, the only difference from the full version is the lack of source code and a small watermark.

Textures

Textures are one of the most demanding and critical assets involved in producing rich applications and, be it with hand-made or processed scanned textures, most developers do not employ specific texture management techniques when using readily available engines such as Unity. As a result, they are either constrained by the texture amount and resolution used, or end up running into Video Memory limitations with synchronous and asynchronous texture upload. It’s a daily struggle to keep everything within limits in order to avoid low performance, long loading times, and the usual stuttering that occurs when an application hits the device memory limit and has to cannibalize System Ram.

As game artist, you might think that this does not apply to your work but, just as 80’s artists were used to work around limited color palettes, you have been working around texture size and memory limitations your entire career. With ever-faster SSD and GPU technology, there’s a real opportunity to improve how we manage texture data.

Amplify Texture provides an alternative method for efficient texture management that allows Unity applications to use a virtually unlimited quantity of textures without compromising quality or performance, it even eliminates texture loading times. With our texture virtualization technology scenes can easily use more than 1TB of texture data without ever hitting video memory limits.