Umbra (3D technology company)

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, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, handheld consoles, iOS, Wii U and other platforms.

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

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

Umbra’s technology is being 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 and Dragon Age Origins & Dragon Age II.

Umbra's technology has been licensed for use in video games by Bungie, Guerrilla Games, CD Projekt RED, Microsoft Game Studios, Team Dakota, Neversoft, Infinity Ward, Shanda Games, 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 PCs.

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 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 December 15, 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 August 28 and the game uses Umbra 3.^[6]

On August 14, 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 “both eyes can use the results of a single occlusion culling operation – effectively halving the required processing time.” ^[8]

On April 3, 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.net studios to use Umbra's Visibility Technology.^[9]

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 February 1, 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 August 11, 2013.

In February 2015, Umbra announced Umbra Cloud and rebranded both the product and the company as simply Umbra.^[10]

References