Imagination collaborates with Unity to deliver lightmapping tool

PowerVR Ray Tracing enables the creation of best-in-class lightmaps inside the Unity game engine. Lightmaps are the current gold standard for lighting quality and fidelity in games and the PowerVR Ray Tracing-aided rendering delivers lightmaps with unmatched performance and accuracy while dramatically speeding up the lightmap creation process.

This integration opens up an unprecedented new workflow for lightmap creation. Traditionally, lightmaps must be pre-calculated in an offline process that can consume hours and interrupts the artistic process. PowerVR Ray Tracing delivers real-time feedback, allowing artists to create lightmaps interactively while they are working.

Joachim Ante, CTO of Unity Technologies, demonstrated on stage at the Unity special event today the benefits of the integration, and further comments: “We are delighted that our collaboration with Imagination Technologies brings to artists and game developers a very powerful way to build the lightmaps they want interactively, without sacrificing the quality of the rendering. Unity has demanding customers and by combining Imagination’s PowerVR Ray Tracing technology with our game engine we can empower them to create visually stunning games.”

Graham Deacon, senior director, PowerVR Business Operations, Imagination, says: “We are working with select partners like Unity to make it as easy as possible for our developer ecosystem to get involved with our ground-breaking PowerVR Ray Tracing GPU IP. Unity has a hugely popular and widely deployed game engine, so it was an easy choice to join with them to bring our ray tracing software rendering technology to developers. Fully interactive ray tracing has long been a ‘holy grail’ of the games industry and this brings us one step closer to our goal of making fully dynamic, physically based effects directly available to artists with Imagination’s hardware accelerated ray tracing technology.”

Imagination Technologies’ ground-breaking PowerVR Ray Tracing technology delivers real-time interactive ray tracing with power consumption and compact silicon area suitable for mobile and consumer games platforms. It makes possible the direct use of accelerated ray tracing in game runtimes, delivering the following benefits:

• Improved quality: the visual quality achievable through ray tracing exceeds that achievable on mobile platforms through conventional methods.
• Improved performance: PowerVR Ray Tracing is hyper-efficient, resulting in lower bandwidth requirements and lower GPU loading for effects such as shadows and reflections – this translates directly into higher performance games.
• Greater artistic freedom: by implementing ray traced effects in runtime hardware, intermediate mapping stages are eliminated, resulting in unconstrained gameplay and greater visual fidelity.
• Reduced development and deployment costs: with lighting effects generated in the runtime, asset creation and deployment are simplified, resulting in a faster development process and cheaper deployment.