Umbra 3 used in Bungie’s Destiny

The vast majority of gaming fans and games industry members are probably engrossed in Destiny this morning, but if you’ve managed to tear yourself away from your space-faring adventures, you might be interested to learn a little about the tech behind the game.

Finnish tools firm Umbra Software has revealed that its flagship product, Umbra 3 Visibility Solution, has been used by Bungie to help improve the look of Destiny’s world.

The technology automatically generates occlusion data so that if an object can’t be seen by the player, the game doesn’t render it – meaning the artists can cram in more detail to whatever is currently visible on screen. This data is also used for audio occlusion.

Umbra has been working with Bungie since 2011, and many of the features found in Umbra 3 were developed specifically for Destiny.

"Umbra’s technology plays an important role in the creation of our next universe by freeing our artists from the burden of manual markups typically associated with polygon soup," explained Bungie’s senior graphics architect Hao Chen.

Umbra CTO Otso Mäkinen added: "It has been a real honour working with Bungie’s engineering team and meeting the technical challenges presented by Destiny."