Obi 7 beta

[josemendez]

We’re releasing a beta version of Obi 7.  If you own any Obi asset and you’re interested in trying this beta out, please write an email to obi+beta@virtualmethodstudio.com stating your invoice number, and we’ll send you a beta version of the asset(s) you own. We’ll start processing these requests on May 3rd. Depending on how many requests we get, it might take a while for us to reply so please be patient .

What’s new in Obi 7:

GPU compute backend

Making its debut in Obi 7, a GPU based physics solver backend written entirely using compute shaders. It can deal with many more particles and constraints than the Burst backend can. Here's an example video of GPU fluids:


Oni backend has been removed

The Oni native backend had been deprecated in Obi 6, and has been entirely removed in Obi 7. This has allowed us to focus our efforts on the Burst and Compute backends, and for tighter integration with Unity.

Multithreaded rendering

Obi 6.X did all rendering and mesh updating in the main thread, the rendering system in Obi 7 has been rewritten from the ground up and is now part of the solver backend chosen. The Burst backend performs mesh updates/rendering in a multithreaded fashion using jobs, and the Compute backend does it uses compute shaders. This greatly improves rendering performance in both backends, something specially noticeable in scenes with many actors.

Here's a comparison between 6.5's rendering performance and 7.0's of the "Benchmark" cloth sample scene when using the Burst backend: 2.5 ms vs 1.5 ms



Improved force zones

Force zones have also been rebuilt from scratch. They’re now fully multithreaded and they support any collider shape, which means you can have capsule or box shaped fields, and even use distance fields. Also, collision filters can now be used with force zones as well, so it’s easy to specify which actors should be affected by which zones.

Just add a ObiForceZone component to any trigger collider, select whether it’s a directional or radial field, set a falloff distance and you’re good to go, here's a couple examples:



Support for non-manifold cloth meshes.

In Obi 7 you can use non-manifold meshes as input to cloth blueprints. No more worrying about your mesh topology.

Automatic cloth decimation

When generating a cloth blueprint, you can choose the amount of detail used to generate particles by specifiying the minimum distance between particle centers. This allows you to take complex meshes and output a simplified cloth blueprint without any need to manually edit your mesh, the simplified cloth simulation is automatically skinned to the full-resolution mesh.

Here's the same cloth mesh at full resolution, and decimated so that particle distance is larger than 0.04:



Simplified cloth proxy system

Proxies are now built into the ObiClothRenderer component. Any mesh can be attached to a cloth simulation in a couple clicks: add a ObiSkinmap asset, click "Bind" and you're done.

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Remember this is a beta version. Its purpose is to be tested in a variety of use cases by people that haven’t been involved in its development, so that we’re able to identify and fix any issues that arise. This release might be unstable, so please don’t use it in production. If you think you might have found a bug, have any issues with it, any questions, or just want to give us some feedback, write to support(at)virtualmethodstudio.com and let us know!

Once it’s out of beta, then what?

If you own any Obi product(s), then you’ll be able to update them to version 7 for free. If you don’t own Obi yet, you’ll be able to purchase version 7 at it the same price version 6 has. Once you own it you can use it in as many projects as you’d like for as long as you’d like.

Thanks to everyone that has been using Obi over the years, helping us improve it. I hope I’ll be able to keep working on it for as long as possible, and that you’ll be there to enjoy the results.

kind regards,