Hi everyone, this is a pre-announcement for RAZOR, a suite of high-performance, multithreaded, scene management systems for Unity.
Our team developed RAZOR internally for an open-world game we’re currently working on and it works so well we thought we would share it with the community! Basically, we wanted something that was drag drop easy for artists, very visual in the editor and above all extremely fast at run time.
It’s comprised of two, complete, stand-alone systems:
RAZOR eliminates all the draw calls from an occluded area so your scene will save however many draw calls + verts that area contained and if you use LOD’s with your models you’ll be able to control exactly which model the player sees at a given distance (low in the distance, high detail up close, that kind of thing).
It’s genuinely multithreaded. We tried a coroutine design first but, as you can imagine, it affected the scenes performance so we rewrote it using threads.
RAZOR operates similiar to Umbra but requires some manual setup in your scene (though it’s simply point-click-drag and visual). With RAZOR you can see occlusion bounding volumes and adjust them in realtime, nothing needs to be marked static and there is no ‘baking’ process - just drag/drop, adjust and hit play. RAZOR also allows you to link together child occlusion areas to create the exact shape you need for a given area - for example a tunnel leading into a room with an elevator shaft or a hallway with windows; you could create small areas outside the windows and link them with the room.
RAZOR’s multithreaded so it won’t impact your framerate but it’s also smart enough to scan for occlusion only when the player nears a zoned area for maximum efficiency. So maps with a 1000 occlusion zones run just as fast as maps with 1.
We’re charging $99 for it on our site temporarily until it get’s accepted to the app store then it’ll be $150 (slightly less than Umbra’s $30,000 :)) but then again RAZOR also works with Indie.
I added a video to the bottom of the information page so you can see it running. There is a run time demo coming which will show all of our technologies in one scene (RAZOR, advanced terrain with caves tunnels, real-time day/night sky with cumulus clouds, single draw call 3D water, advanced vegetation, etc.).
Thanks… this is seriously OT but for fun here’s a screenshot of the sun rising using the volumetric sky system. It looks quite epic from inside the giant cave up on the other side of the mountain. Our goal was to make it as photo-realistic as possible.
WOW. Are all these features you mentioned all within the same RAZOR Occlusion package? (besides the occlusion system - eg. Cave/tunnel/day night cycle… etc)
If that’s the case, I am definitely going to buy that
Indeed nice work! excited about the coming run time demo we are =)
But from which component does these black lines come from?
Your project seems to be a massive time saver.
I noticed those weird black lines as well in the video - must be some compression thing CamStudio did converting the video to flash swf. It’s definitely not in the scene.
