Thursday, October 1st, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Graphine releases Granite for Unity 5


Built of Granite: Nurulize’s Rise VR demo uses Graphine’s Granite texture-streaming technology to display large textures in real time on Unreal Engine 4. The developer has just released a new version of Granite for Unity 5.

Graphics middleware company Graphine has released a new version of Granite, its texture-streaming system, for Unity 5, and introduced new perpetual licence and rental prices for the plugin.

So what is Granite?
Like Amplify Creations’ Amplify Texture, Granite enables games artists to use textures larger than will normally fit into memory by streaming only those parts visible to the camera from disk at runtime.

As well as being available as middleware, Graphine develops plugins based on its Granite SDK for commercial game engines. Users include The Mill, game developer The Farm 51 and tech firms Oculus and Allegorithmic.

According to Graphine, the system allows you “to use textures up to 256Kx256K, hundreds of 4K or 8K textures [or] VFX-graded UDIM textures, all in only a few hundred megabytes of memory and with no loading times”.

Pricing and availability
Granite is available for both Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5, deploying to PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One and Playstation 4. The Unreal Engine plugin costs $590; the Unity plugin costs $349.

The Unity version can also be rented for $199/year or $20/month.

Read more about Granite on Graphine’s website