Author:AXYZ DESIGN
Date:2020-12-18
ANIMA® 4.1.0 RELEASED!
CUDA GPU ACCELERATED
This update includes a whole host of new features related to 4D playback. Several improvements have been made to anima to handle many more 4D actors than what was previously possible. The biggest improvement comes from the addition of GPU video decoding for those with compatible NVIDIA GPUs.
RELEASE NOTES:
anima®: The biggest improvement comes from the addition of GPU video decoding for those with compatible NVIDIA GPUs. In supported systems, a new option will be visible from the preferences panel to choose between CPU or GPU video decoding. Choosing GPU decoding will give significant performance improvements when playing back 4D actors in the anima viewport while reducing CPU usage overall. Many other tweaks have also been implemented to handle larger amounts of 4D actors in the viewport at the same time without the need to turn them into boxes. If you want to try this out, make sure to increase the previous limit of visible 4D actors in the viewport's graphics panel. A new LOD has also been implemented to improve playback from very far distances, which will be automatically applied when updating the 4D assets to their newer version.
anima: Simulation performance has been improved on scenes with large backgrounds. The internal collision tree has also been made more efficient, resulting in both a speed increase and a file size reduction for any anima project.
metropoly®: The whole collection of 4D actors has been reprocessed to give a higher and more consistent level of quality. These assets are backward compatible with previous versions of anima, but most of their performance improvements will be available when updating anima to 4.1.0. The most notable change will be that the texture quality of these actors when being rendered by the anima Plugin will be higher than the current version.
Unreal Engine 4® Plugin: This update also includes many optimizations to the Unreal Engine 4 plugin, making real-time playback of anima projects much more viable. First, LODs are now generated for all characters, resulting in many performance improvements when looking at large crowds of characters from a distance. Second, we've added direct transfer capabilities when using GPU decoding for the playback of 4D actors, resulting in some really big increases in real-time performance. For example, internal benchmarks have shown that scenes with up to 20 4D actors can go from around 20 FPS to 160 FPS in a system using a single GTX 1080, making these projects much more viable for projects that require high refresh rates. These performance improvements are available when using the D3D11 or D3D12 RHI. The Vulkan RHI will also have performance improvements, but no direct transfer is available at the moment. We encourage you to give this update a try if you were interested in having 4D actors in real-time scenarios.