What did Unity just announce at Unite 2022
Announcements from Unity's 2022 conference. An exciting look at everything new: cross-platform, XRI, advanced UI, immersive graphics, and facial animation.
UNITY FOR ALL:
The Unite 2022 conference was held on November 1st, and it was an exciting look at everything new coming to Unity! John Riccadello started out by saying that Unity has a big market share in the gaming industry. They have been looking to extend support across all their platforms whether it's PC, Mobile or any other gaming device. Specifically they are going to extend support for Xbox series S, X and PS5 with a new inclusion of Meta Quest Pro and Android asset building so you will see constant improvements to those pipelines. They will also have support for VR2, Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro. The big takeaway was improvements across device play so if you create a game for Meta Quest 2 you will be able to share these things between the other platforms whether it’s PlayStation, VR or Console.
XRI:
Unity has a new 2.2 update for their XRI toolkit package which is available now in Unity 2021 LTS. It allows a simplified solution to create interactions with an inbuilt framework and set of APIs which can be deployed across all of the platforms without you having to create multiple versions or support multiple different devices. Then you can even use this to build your own APIs for custom interactions!
ADVANCED UI:
Unity is going to integrate the UI Toolkit for better UI functionality so you can get a better separation of concerns, more Flexible Layouts and Advanced Styling. With the new UI Toolkit, you can use visual workflows to easily create Buttons, Text Fields, and Toolbars to any game. The UI toolkit will also generate default inspectors and have new Tree View controls. It supports multiple columns and large data sets. You can even make vector drawings like splines and different graph style outputs.
CREATE IMMERSIVE GRAPHICS:
Unity has added some new features to High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) skies. It Supports a High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), so with just a couple clicks you can create a realistic world! It supports up to eight layers of clouds and allows you to have hundreds of variations. Each cloud can be affected by wind to create Dynamic Skies. It supports Volumetric Clouds, Fog and even Light Shafts. There's a brand-new water system for creating Seas, Lakes, Rivers, and Pools. And they have new features like the Adaptive probe volume system which automatically scatters light around your scene for all real-time objects. With the new DirectX 12 support, Unity will have better performance overall. Even in large-scale environments with over 4000 draw calls and 100 FPS performance gain.
FACIAL ANIMATION:
Unity talked about their recently acquired Zeva Dynamics to create realistic facial animations that you can control at runtime. A new hair system package is also included that is highly performant and can render millions of hairs to create absolutely photorealistic creations.
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