Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Amplify Creations unveils Amplify Texture 2 for Unity

Originally posted on 21 January. Scroll down for updates.

Amplify Creations has announced Amplify Texture 2, an update to its innovative virtual texturing plugin for Unity.

The software, which we wrote about back when the company was still called Insidious Technologies, enables games artists to use textures larger than will normally fit into memory by streaming only those parts of the texture visible to the camera from disk at runtime.

Higher resolutions, better compression and support for multi-tile UVs
Version 2 of the plugin raises the maximum size of the virtual textures it supports from 512,000 x 512,000 pixels to 2 million x 2 million pixels, or 4 Terapixels in total.

Amplify Creations also says that its lossy texture compression system has been improved, quoting a final build size of 1.5GB for the scene shown in the demo above, compared to 7GB with standard DXT compression.

The update also adds support for multi-tile UV workflows for artists working with paint packages like Mari, ZBrush or Mudbox, and for virtualised displacement.

In addition, Amplify Texture 2 will support HDR textures, light maps, anisotropic filtering, hardware sparse texturing and baked Substances, among a number of other new features.

Pricing and availability
Amplify Texture 2 is currently available to pre-order for $400, which gets you access to development builds, the first of which is due out later this month.

Version 1 of the software is currently available for Unity Pro 3.5.7f6 and above, price $350. It runs on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

Updated 2 September: Amplify Creations has released the first public build of Amplify Texture 2.

It’s still a work in progress, but supports anisotropic filtering, plus support for physically based shaders from Marmoset’s Skyshop, RUST’s Alloy and the open-source Lux framework.

Read more about the new features in Amplify Texture 2 on Amplify Creations’ website

Download the public trial of Amplify Texture 2