MCV @ GAMESCOM INSIGHT: Graphine on its new Granite SDK

Aljosha Demeulemeester, CEO of middleware specialists Graphine Software, tells MCV @ Gamescom about the firm’s new Granite SDK.

What have you brought to Gamescom this year?

We’re showing off thelatest iteration (2.3) ofthe Granite SDK: our fine- grained texture streaming and texture compression middleware that allows our partners to use significantly more texture content.

This year we didn’t only bring the standalone version of Granite SDK with us, but we’re also putting two of our newest versions in the spotlight: Granite for Unreal and Granite for Unity. And the best thing is that we’ll be showing it all off with brand new live demosat our booth (D-012) in hall 4.1 of the Business Area.

What are the latest developments at Graphine?

We recently launched our integrations for Unreal 4 and Unity 3D.

Granite for Unreal is our ready-to-use integration into the Unreal Engine 4. Granite for Unity is a deeply integrated plugin for Unity 3D that allows developers to access Granite SDK’s features directly from within the Unity editor without any need to alter their workflow.

With our Granite for Unity plugin, we’ll make sure that small teams can use our technology for their projects. But we’ll have more to share about that soon.

Of course, we are continuously extending the Granite SDK with major additions such as supportfor hardware virtual texturing (DX11.2), texture atlases, BC7 and BC6 support, etc.

We’ve also doubled our team since last year in order to offer the best support possible. The fact that we were nominated for the 2014 Develop Awards has been a great recognition of our evolution as a young, dynamic, but, most of all, professional team and we’re dedicated to prove the nomination was well deserved in the coming year.

What new trends are you looking to capitalise on?

3D scanning and photogrammetry techniques are gaining traction with game developers. They’re a very efficient way to obtain highly detailed 3D objects and texture data.

Developers wishing to push the boundaries of graphics quality are experimenting with 3D scanning but theyhit memory and storage limitations. Our Granite SDK is a perfect solution as it is designed to handle massive amounts of unique texture content. We’ll continue to add features to allow for even higher texture quality.