Umbra 3 Overview

The purpose of Umbra 3 is to increase frame rate and ease game development. Umbra 3 does this 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.

Umbra 3 can be used on any platform from high end consoles to mobile gaming devices such as iPhones and PSPs.

How Does UMBRA 3 Work?

Umbra 3 has two basic components: Umbra 3 Optimizer and Umbra 3 Runtime.

Umbra 3 Optimizer is a content processing tool that takes the geometry of a 3D scene as input and automatically generates data that can be used at runtime to optimize performance-critical computation. Umbra 3 Optimizer uses auto-generated portals and PVS to represent the scene data in a format that can be effectively accessed at runtime.

Umbra 3 can be used on any platform from high end consoles to mobile gaming devices such as iPhones and PSPs.

Rendering Optimization

Umbra 3 point visibility queries are used to determine the objects that are visible from the camera’s point of view.

Performance is gained on both the CPU and GPU since hidden objects can be culled out in an early stage. Umbra 3 point visibility queries help you render complex game worlds full of detail.

Optimized Streaming

Umbra 3 region visibility queries are used to determine the objects that are visible from a given region in a 3D scene.

Umbra 3 region visibility queries can be used to determine which objects could become visible during the next 30 seconds of game play. You save memory by not loading in data that’s not needed for rendering in the near future.

Game Logic Optimization

Umbra 3 distance queries can be used to determine the approximate topological distance between two points or to find out the set of objects within a given distance from a point.

Umbra 3 distance queries help decide which AIs need to be activated, sound sources that are relevant to the player and scripted events that need to be processed.

Fast Parallel Processing

Umbra 3 queries work independently from rendering and they don't need any updates from the game engine. This makes it possible to process multiple Umbra 3 queries whenever you want to without having to worry about synchronization.

Umbra 3 queries only use static data for processing. This makes Umbra 3 queries extremely fast. For example a single point visibility query takes about 0.1ms of CPU time.

Evaluation

If you are interested in evaluating Umbra, please fill out our web contact form:

Or for more information, visit Umbra's official site (English): www.umbrasoftware.com