Graphine Software has released Granite for Unity into a public beta program and is offering a free 30 day trial version.
The Granite for Unity plugin provides advanced texture streaming in Unity 3D. It provides the ability to offer the large amounts of texture data that high-end games and visualization applications need. It combines virtual texturing techniques with a fine-grained streaming system to handle all texture content.
Artists and environment creators can keep adding textures to their virtual worlds, without worrying about memory usage and manually optimizing assets to stay within the technical limitations. With Granite for Unity, developers are not bound by limitations on texture resolution imposed by Unity 3D and the underlying graphics APIs. If applications require it, game developers can use textures of 16K x 16K all the way up to texture resolutions of 256K x 256K. And Granite for Unity provides the ability to use many of these huge textures at the same time.
To facilitate a game developer’s need to distribute these textures to gamers, Granite for Unity offers a range of compression settings and quality modes to offer high texture quality, while compressing file sizes by 65% and more.
The Granite for Unity trial version offers all of the features found in the full version, introducing developers to the texture streaming and texture compression plugin that expands what’s graphically possible in Unity 3D. Granite for Unity is available to license on a per-seat basis. Licenses are offered in four varieties, each with their specialized feature set optimized for the various needs of users. Options include:
- Granite for Unity LITE: For projects with textures too large for Unity to handle.
- Granite for Unity VIZ: Is optimized to power high-end 3D visualization projects including architecture, product visualization, VFX, and more. Granite for Unity – VIZ is enhances visualizations with features like HDR textures and optimum configurability.
- Granite for Unity INDIE: Smaller game development teams looking for the best texture quality while keeping memory usage and loading times under control can use the INDIE version for first class graphics in an accessible package.
- Granite for Unity TEAM: This version of the plugin is for larger game development teams and is designed for large projects aiming to achieve next generation graphics with an efficient workflow during production.
For an overview of the features on each version, visit the Granite for Unity product specification
page.