Tag Archives for Global Illumination

Unity5 Announced!

Unity5http://unity3d.com/5

I’m getting straight to the point here, what is in included in Unity5:

Physically-based Shading:

There’s a new shader to setup great looking materials in a range of lighting environments, it’s one shader to rule them all, an uber-shader one might call it, you can use it for a range of different surfaces such as wood, metal, plastics, ceramics, cloth and many others.

Unity5_Teleporter

Realtime Global Illumination:

Built upon Geomerics Enlighten Technology, Unity5 has integrated realtime physically-based Global Illumination for cross-platform, runs super nice on mobile / tablet devices. You can animate lights, setup beautiful environments lighting and make use of emissive materials to create stunning effects and visuals. What’s really nice, as an added bonus, you now don’t need to be rebaking any lightmaps, which is especially painful when bake times are long for larger scenes, Global Illumination updates immediately upon making any changes to help dramatically increase iterative times.

WebGL:

The plugin-less browser technology is approaching fast and Unity5 will offer the option to deploy to WebGL without the need for a plugin download to playback content, with a one-click deploy system the building times are super fast and simular to what our WebPlayer plugin build system is like.

Audio Mixer:

New audio mixng technology enters Unity5 with simple workflows for setting up different sounds within your 2d / 3d games. Setup realtime mixing graphs, ability to edit tweak in play mode, create and blend between snapshots, insert effects into the mixers, implement ducking of sounds and many more..

UnityCloud:

This service offers the ability to integrate cross-promotion campaigns for acquiring players and help with retaining them

64-bit Editor:

64-bit editor brings massive improvements to Unity for handling demanding tasks 32-bit version might just crash on with out of memory, the runtime was ported a while back now, but getting the editor ported with all the dependencies took time.

PhysX 3.3:

The much requested update to PhysX has arrived, NVIDIA completely rewrote the system, bringing excellent performance boosts which is great for mobile / tablet devices. A new wheel collider is available amongst other things, more PhysX 3.3 features will be exposed later in the 5.x cycle.

There’s many more features in Unity5 which will just populate my blog, but here is more smaller but equally juicy feature set:

  • AI: NavMesh supports LoadLevelAdditive.
  • NavMeshObstacle supports two basic shapes – cylinder and box for both carving and avoidance.
  • Editor: The editor is now a 64-bit application.
  • Graphics: Improved ambient lighting.
  • Cubemaps support texture compression
  • Improved LODGroup. A “fade mode” can be set on each level and a value of “how current LOD be blended/faded to the next LOD” will be passed to shader program in unity_Scale.z.
  • Non-uniformly scaled meshes no longer incur any memory cost or performance hit.
  • PluginInspector: new plugin system.
  • Scripting: Introduced option to auto-update obsolete Unity API usage in scripts / assemblies.
  • Version Control: Scene and Prefab Merging.
  • Asset Store: The asset store window is now many times faster, more responsive, and looks better.
  • Model importing: Updated FBX SDK to 2015.1
  • Windows Store Apps: You can now use joysticks in addition to Xbox 360 controllers

For a more visual look at Unity5‘s new feature set, take a look at the official Unity Feature Preview video:

With such an exciting announcement I can’t wait for all you guys to get your hands on this awesome toolset!

Thanks!