Unigine 2.20 adds support for 3D Gaussian Splatting
Unigine has released Unigine 2.20, the latest version of the real-time 3D engine.
It’s a wide-ranging update, introducing a new drag-and-drop UI-building system, improving render quality and performance, and expanding support for VR and XR hardware.
Enterprise users with Engineering and Sim subscriptions also get experimental support for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS).
A high-end real-time 3D engine for enterprise-scale projects
First released in 2005, Unigine began as a more general-purpose game engine, but since 2012 has focused on enterprise markets, including simulation, engineering and training.
Unique features include 64-bit precision for world space co-ordinates.
That means that, unlike most standard game engines, which use 32-bit precision, Unigine can simulate planet-scale scenes rather than much smaller game worlds.
The high-end editions – the Engineering SDK and Sim SDK, both priced on demand – also support GIS data and common CAD data formats, and support OpenGL as well as DirectX.
However, the software can also be used for entertainment work, and since 2020, has been available free for commercial projects that generate under $100,000/year in revenue.
Unigine 2.20: new visual UI design system
Unigine 2.20 itself introduces an experimental drag-and-drop system for building user interfaces for applications created using the engine.
The new UI Designer enables designers to create and edit UI designs in real time inside the Unigine Editor, rather than having to write and compile code.
A built-in widget library provides readymade designs for common UI elements like buttons, sliders and progress bars.
It is complemented by the Runtime Editor, a lightweight live debugging tool, making it possible to troubleshoot UI designs without stopping the application.
Improvements to rendering, particularly to render upscaling and LOD quality
Improvements to rendering include support for DLSS, NVIDIA’s AI render upscaling and frame generation technology, under Vulkan as well as DirectX 12.
FSR, AMD’s equivalent technology is now “fully supported” on Vulkan as well as DirectX 12.
There is also a new Octahedral mode for generating billboard imposters: lightweight versions of 3D assets displayed when the asset is a long distance from the render camera.
It generates fewer visual distortions than the existing Spherical mode, particularly when the imposters are not seen face on, as shown in the video above.
Expanded support for VR and XR hardware
There are also a lot of improvements to Unigine’s OpenXR-based support for VR and XR hardware, including support for eye tracking and foveated rendering.
Unigine also now has “basic support” for mixed reality passthrough mode on Meta Quest 3 and Varjo XR-3 headsets.
The release also features performance improvements across the board, including reductions in startup time, and to RAM and GPU memory usage.
You can find detailed comparisons in the online documentation.
Sim and Engineering subscriptions only: support for 3D Gaussian Splatting
Users with Engineering and Sim subscriptions also get support for 3D Gaussian Splatting.
The new 3D scanning method generates high-quality reconstructions of real-world objects or environments from source photos and videos.
3DGS data can now be rendered in an increasing number of DCC applications: it is supported natively in V-Ray, and via third-party plugins in Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine.
Unigine can now import and render 3DGS data imported in .ply format via an experimental new plugin.
Pricing and system requirements
Unigine 2.20 is available for 64-bit Windows 10+ and Linux (kernel 4.19+). Both engine and editor are hardware-agnostic: find a list of supported AMD, Intel and NVIDIA GPUs here.
The Community Free edition is free to use for non-commercial work and commercial projects with revenue or funding under $100,000 in the past 12 months.
The Community Pro edition has no revenue cap, with subscriptions now costing $1,500/year. You can find a feature comparison table with the enterprise editions here.
Read an overview of the new features in Unigine 2.20 on Unigine’s blog
Read a full list of new features in Unigine 2.20 in the online release notes
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