Native-Async-Texture-Renderer

Asynchronous Texture Uploads and Rendering for Unity

Native (C++) Unity plugin that can upload large textures to the GPU asynchronously and Render on a separate thread, without blocking the main render thread. This meant primarily for mobile platforms.

Supported Platforms and API:

• Android armv7 x86 and x64 with openGL 2.0+
• Unity 2018.1+
• ios and metal api's might be coming soon.

Code Organization

Code is organized as follows:

• Project:
  • Unity project source.
• PluginSource
  • Renderer: is the android studio project files and source code for the native c++ rendering plugin build with ndk.
  • LibJPEG wrapper: source code for the underlying jpeg files decoding library. Based on libjpeg-turbo -> link
  • LibPNG : .PNG texture files support will be added later.

Building Android Studio Plugin

use ndk-build in the JNI folder to generate appropriate .so libraries.

Usage

Check RenderExample.cs for a working example.

Note: Init Texture2D objects before the actual render call occurs. Even creating a texture instance is done on the Unity's main thread, hence it's a good idea to either use a re-usable TexturePool for a large amount of textures or pre-init textures for small amounts of rendering.

Unity Synchronization and Async Approach

NativeTextureRenderer uses a RenderQueue managed by the main thread to add and run Render Events.

NativeTextureRenderer.RenderTexture(string path, IntPtr texturePtr, int width, int height);

The following method automatically, adds a render event into the Queue and executes it in FIFO order.

GL.IssuePluginEvent()

Is called at every renderevent drawcall to update the rendering instance from c++ to unity engine.