Umbra (company)

Umbra
Information
Industry	Computer graphics software, 3D optimization middleware
Founded	2006, Helsinki, Finland
Headquarters	Helsinki, Finland
Notable Personnel	Otso Mäkinen (CTO, later CEO), Shawn Adamek (chief marketing officer, later chief strategy officer)
Products	Umbra 3 visibility solution, Umbra Cloud, Umbra Composit, SceneStream
Parent	Amazon (since 2021)
Website	https://umbra3d.com

Umbra (called Umbra Software in its press material until 2014) is a Finnish computer graphics software company based in Helsinki. It is best known for its occlusion culling middleware, which works out which parts of a 3D scene are hidden from the camera so that a game engine can skip rendering them. Umbra's occlusion culling was built into the Unity engine starting with Unity 3 in 2010, and the company licensed it to console and PC game studios for titles such as Call of Duty: Ghosts, Destiny and Fallout 4.

The company pitched its technology to virtual reality developers from 2014, when it promoted a "Stereo Camera" feature that lets both eyes share one occlusion query. From 2015 it moved into cloud processing and streaming of very large 3D models, and in 2017 it launched Umbra Composit, a cloud service that optimized building and engineering models for web browsers, mobile devices and headsets such as Microsoft HoloLens and Samsung Gear VR. Amazon acquired Umbra in January 2021; no price was announced. The umbra3d.com site, now under an Amazon Web Services copyright, publishes Umbra 3 SDK releases; version 3.4.26 added optional support for AWS Deadline Cloud render farms and an Unreal Engine 5 plugin.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Every citation re-opened: Unity 3/4.3 integration, founding-year statements, Umbra 3 technical details, licensee and funding releases, Stereo Camera, Trimble, Composit, Helsinki model, SceneStream, Amazon acquisition and current umbra3d.com release notes. About review dates.

History

Origins

Umbra's technology came out of the Finnish graphics firm Hybrid Graphics. A 2012 company feature published by Game Developer said Umbra Software "was spun off from Hybrid Graphics when it acquired the dPVS system", and that its core engineering team had worked on occlusion culling since 2000. An earlier visibility library already used the name: Timo Aila's October 2000 master's thesis at the Helsinki University of Technology, instructed by Hybrid Holding CTO Ville Miettinen, described "SurRender Umbra", a commercial visibility determination framework for dynamic scenes whose trademark belonged to Hybrid Holding, Ltd. NVIDIA announced on 22 March 2006 that it would acquire Hybrid Graphics, then a maker of graphics middleware for mobile devices.

Umbra's own statements give two founding years. Press releases from 2013 described Umbra Software Ltd. as "founded in 2007", while releases from 2015 onward gave 2006, some adding that it "was founded in 2006 by its current owners". The 2012 feature also gave 2006, and a 2014 release said the visibility technology had "been in development since 2007". In 2018 Geo Week News described Otso Mäkinen as Umbra's founder. Mäkinen was the company's chief technology officer in its 2013-2015 press releases and its CEO by October 2015.

Game middleware (2010-2015)

Unity Technologies announced Unity 3.0 at the 2010 Game Developers Conference with "integrated licensed technology from Illuminate Labs and Umbra Software". Umbra's occlusion culling software and the Beast lightmapper were both included in Unity Pro at no extra cost. Unity 3 shipped in September 2010; its feature list described the occlusion culling as a "Completely new Umbra-powered PVS solution". In November 2013 Unity 4.3 shipped with occlusion culling features developed by Umbra in close collaboration with Unity, including cached, incremental bakes and culling of occluded shadow casters. Unity's manual for the 2019.4 release still stated that "Unity uses the Umbra library to perform occlusion culling."

Umbra 3, the company's main product in this period, builds an occlusion model as an automatically generated graph of portals and cells. An "Optimizer" runs in the game editor during preprocessing: it takes arbitrary "polygon soup" geometry, voxelizes the scene into view cells and divides the world into tiles that can be computed independently. At runtime the portal traversal keeps a single 16-bit, 128x128 depth buffer that is then used for occlusion tests, and the culling algorithm's total work memory is fixed at 85 kilobytes. The company said the software approach avoided the synchronization and portability issues of hardware occlusion queries. Umbra also said the same spatial data could also drive audio occlusion and the streaming of environments based on player position.

Announced licensees included Activision for Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Ghosts (November 2013) and Bungie, which had worked with Umbra since 2011 and used Umbra 3 in every version of Destiny (2014). In February 2015 the company announced Umbra Cloud, which moved the geometry preprocessing to cloud servers, and the Umbra Debugger, a visualization tool for programmers and artists. At that point Umbra was part of Unity and available as a plug-in for Unreal Engine 4. In December 2015 Umbra announced that Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout 4 used the Umbra 3 Visibility Solution; the release said the company had 16 staff in Finland, the United States, Korea, China and Japan. Umbra 3.4, released on 15 April 2016, had a fully rewritten computation pipeline and a new method for generating distance culling data.

Funding and the move beyond games (2015-2020)

On 29 October 2015 Umbra closed a US$3.4 million Series A round from Inventure, Lifeline Ventures, Initial Capital and angel investors. It said it would use the money to develop technology for storing, streaming and rendering massive 3D data sets on any device, naming 3D scanning, architectural planning, construction engineering, digital maps and simulation as target markets alongside games.

In December 2016 Trimble said it was working with Umbra to explore the use of Umbra's optimization technology for complex building information models (BIM) in its Mixed-Reality Pilot Program, which used Microsoft HoloLens. The software reduced triangle counts, generated levels of detail and streamed in only the content visible to the camera. The joint announcement put Umbra's headcount at 20.

Umbra launched Composit on 17 October 2017. The cloud service took CAD and BIM models from Autodesk Revit and Graphisoft ArchiCAD, ran what the company called "Umbrafication" (geometry decimation, occlusion culling, and texture and light baking), and streamed levels of detail on demand to any WebGL device. Supported AR and VR targets included Microsoft HoloLens, Apple ARKit and Samsung Gear VR. Pricing started at US$239 per month. GamesBeat reported that the company then had about 27 employees and that a 70-million-polygon model could be viewed on a HoloLens.

In June 2018 Umbra and the City of Helsinki announced that they would stream the city's open reality mesh to phones, tablets, headsets and web browsers. The model was built from aerial photographs taken in 2015 and covered about 50 square kilometers as a 700 GB texture-mapped mesh, which Geo Week News called a textured photogrammetric mesh. An upgrade announced that October automated more of the optimization and let users store very high-resolution data in the cloud for streaming to AR, VR and mobile devices. Mäkinen also described plans for a crowdsourced, open 3D model of the whole planet. By 2019 the company listed sales offices in San Francisco and Helsinki, and its website offered solutions for autonomous driving, e-commerce, architecture and construction, 3D scanning and gaming; the autonomous-driving page pitched Composit for photorealistic simulation environments. In July 2020 Umbra opened a beta of a redesigned customer portal for SceneStream, its cloud service for optimizing ("umbrafying") uploaded 3D data and sharing the optimized outputs through persistent links.

Amazon (2021 to present)

Law firm Hannes Snellman said on 22 January 2021 that it had advised Umbra and its owners on the company's sale to Amazon. No price was announced. When Amazon announced a Helsinki development center for its Scout delivery robot in July 2021, CNBC wrote that Amazon had reportedly bought Umbra about six months earlier, and Synced reported that the Umbra team would work with Amazon's other Scout teams.

The umbra3d.com site now carries an Amazon Web Services copyright and release notes for the Umbra 3 SDK. Version 3.4.25 added ARM and AWS Graviton builds, optimizations for server-side use and improved volume-to-volume visibility queries. Version 3.4.26 added optional, experimental distributed preprocessing in AWS Deadline Cloud, a CloudWorker executable for build farms, iOS and macOS builds, and an Unreal Engine plugin that supports Unreal Engine 5.

Products

Product	First announced	Description
Umbra occlusion culling in Unity	March 2010 (Unity 3.0)	Built-in occlusion culling preprocess and runtime in the Unity engine; included in Unity Pro at launch
Umbra 3 Visibility Solution	By 2012	Licensed C++ middleware for console, PC and mobile engines; automatic portal-and-cell occlusion data from arbitrary geometry
Umbra Cloud and Umbra Debugger	February 2015	Cloud-based preprocessing and a GUI tool for inspecting visibility data
Umbra Composit	October 2017	Cloud optimization and streaming of large CAD, BIM and scan models to browsers, mobile devices and AR/VR headsets
SceneStream	By July 2020	Cloud service for optimizing uploaded 3D data and sharing the optimized outputs through links

XR work

In 2014 Umbra promoted the Stereo Camera feature of Umbra 3 for stereo scenes such as those rendered for the Oculus Rift. Instead of running one occlusion query per eye, it queries visibility from a sphere that encloses both eyes, so both eyes share the result of a single culling operation; the company said this meant "effectively halving the required processing time" and could help developers "reach 120 fps or build bigger scenes". Umbra also argued that its CPU-based approach could not produce the pop-in of objects that per-eye GPU queries can cause during fast movement. Developer relations manager Thomas Puha told Road to VR that Umbra wanted to work with indie and smaller-budget VR developers as well as large studios.

For GDC 2016 the company prepared a demo that streamed a 3D model of Boston from its cloud to a Samsung smartphone in a Gear VR headset at a consistent 60 frames per second, the platform's maximum. A company blog post said the demo was built in Unity and run on Gear VR with Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge phones, and that the team had to work around Unity's garbage collection and limited low-level access to keep frame rates steady. Later work targeted mixed reality. In an October 2016 HoloLens benchmark, published while the company prepared HoloLens support for an upcoming product, models under 200,000 triangles ran at 30 frames per second, and the headset handled about 80,000 triangles comfortably. The Trimble pilot, Composit and the Helsinki city model all relied on streaming and level-of-detail selection so that large models could be shown on headsets and phones with limited processing power.

See also

• Occlusion culling
• Potentially visible set
• Level of detail
• Stereoscopic rendering