Hey Guys…I am new Unity and to these forums. I really liked how Unity is progressing so I purchased a Pro License. I moved to Unity from another Engine and so far I am very happy. I have been hearing rumors about Umbra and Beast. This may have already been addressed and is probably not true but since I am new to Unity I thought I would ask. Please don’t beat me up to bad for asking this. This is a quote I ran across on another forum:
I have kind of put most of my development dollars on Unity and really like how it operates. If someone closer to Unity than I am could let me know if there is any truth to this it would be deeply appreciated.
In fairness, they aren’t watered down to my eyes… They aren’t simply big red buttons that say “umbra” and “beast”. The options available to you are quite diverse, especially on the beast side of things.
However I am not the most knowledgable in these areas, so if someone else could help reiterate the truth it would help. Otherwise it looks like you may have copied and pasted from the torque forums
I agree with you jackshiels and so far I like everything Unity has to offer. I did not want to start anything about any other Engines so I did not say where I got the quote from but it was a valid quote. Regardless I think I am staying with Unity To me it is a lot easier to work with.
It’s true that not everything is included from Beast currently…not really familiar with Umbra outside Unity, but it kind of seems like it would either work or not? But anyway, calling them “demos” is pretty nonsensical. They’re fully functional, and in the case of Beast, there’s a fair amount of configurability that’s not in the GUI (presumably for the sake of simplicity), but can be accessed through the XML settings file. Also I would be surprised if additional functionality wasn’t integrated in the future.
It also depends on which version of Unity your using. Free has a dumbed down Beast with basic lightmapping of shadows where Pro has all the global illumination, final gathering goodness that make for realistic lighting. Perhaps it’s this that they were talking about.
You do get cut down/ dumbed down versions in Free but thats to be expected. Pro has all the feature rich settings and I think Unity Devs have been working at ease of use and simplicity for the end user over throwing everything in one big jumble. I’m sure there are things that are missing which have been left out until they have found intuitive ways to incorporate them into the editor and current render engine.
Perhaps forthcoming 3.x builds will slowly integrate new features and 3 matures. Too many competing products like to throw everything plus the kitchen sink in their engines just so they can say, see we have all these features the competition doesn’t or not in their base version, often without much consideration about the end users experience in mind and often causing problems or breaking usage conventions to get specific things to work.
Before Unity I used Ogre and played with irrlicht. Had similar arguments there, the biggest one being ogres proprietary format where irrlicht could load dozens of geometry formats. Only problem was no one mentioned that at the time there was no unified animation system, each format had it’s own methods for handling animation, and even for static geometry you had to mix formats depending on whether you wanted lightmapping, animation, 2UV’s. vertex lighting. So you had a complete mess.
Unity seem to think things through and even though we don’t have a public roadmap it’s obvious that a lot of thought goes into the integration of each feature they put in and fits with interface and usage conventions we are familiar with.
Others have explained with regards to Beast, but I’d like to clarify a bit with regards to Umbra.
Umbra is a company, not a product or technology!
Umbra have developed several different occlusion culling technologies, and the one used in Unity is a new one that is currently not available in any other products.
To quote Joachim Ante (our CTO) from a comment in this blog post:
So really, anyone saying that Unity only contains a “watered down version of Umbra” don’t really even have any clue about the terms they are using, let alone the specific Umbra-developed occlusion culling technology included with Unity.
Thanks runevision and all others who took the time to answer some questions. I have done a lot of research on different engines and personally own a license to three other engines. I feel like I have made the “Right” decision to move to Unity. People seem to be a lot more helpful and friendlier over here. Not used to that.
That means that we are not right that Unity currently is lacking the GFXQuery based occlusion in realtime then, falling back to the offline generated data only, disabling dynamic objects from acting as occluder which is one of the features Umbra offers? You know, I wouldn’t mind to be wrong on that, not the slightest bit
Or is unity just using a “new product of umbra” that unlike the announcement indicated is not actually Umbra and which doesn’t feature this at all and which doesn’t feature multithreaded offline generation of PVS on windows at all?
judging from the tone of the post, i can sense a bitter Torque (Garage Game) member who said it,
Do they still using “source code” as their main selling point
Like I said, Umbra is a company, not a specific technology or product. The occlusion culling technology used in Unity 3 is made by Umbra. The technology made by Umbra that Unity uses has pros and cons compared to other technologies made by Umbra. One of the pros is that the technology in Unity works across all platforms, including mobile devices, which is not the case with the other technologies made by Umbra as far as I am informed.
To me it is a lot easier to work with.