Posts by Aras Pranckevičius

Yes! I did a talk at SIGGRAPH! Ahem. So yeah, a bunch of us were at SIGGRAPH 2011 in lovely Vancouver, doing talks, meeting people and going to super interesting sessions. Me & ReJ did a long technical session about optimizing graphics for mobile platforms. GPU architectures, shader optimization details, case studies from actual Unity…

Google’s Native Client (NaCl) is a brilliant idea. TL;DR: it allows native code to be run securely in the browser. Here’s a collection of developer-centric notes about it (it’s not very Unity specific). But is it secure? “Bububut, waitaminnit! Native code is not secure by definition” you say. Turns out, that isn’t necessarily true. With…

Last week, we started talking about Unity 3.2 by giving you a look at one of the updated Standard Assets. We’ll have more to show soon, but in the meantime we wanted to tell you about some of the optimizations that have been made to deliver great looking high-performance graphics on iOS and Android. Precision…

Unity 3 launched recently, and with Surface Shaders we made it much easier to handle lighting, shadowing & rendering paths pieces of shaders. But Unity can run on so many platforms (some having very different shader languages), yet you can write a shader once, and somehow it “just works” on all platforms. How do we…

In Unity you can write your own custom shaders, but it’s no secret that writing them is hard, especially when you need shaders that interact with per-pixel lights & shadows. In Unity 3, that would be even harder because in addition to all the old stuff, your shaders would have to support the new Deferred…

This blog post is written by Sándor Moldán (Nekharoth on forums) who has been working on Terrain Toolkit to help generate realistic terrains in Unity Editor. The project was one of the four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code. Terrain Toolkit The Terrain Toolkit is an integrated set of tools…

…I took a plane to Copenhagen. Well ok, it all started a bit before:

At end of April 2009, Joachim sent this out to all developers at Unity: We want to try one more thing… On Friday work on something cool. I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are…

This blog post is written by Sándor Moldán who is working on a set of Terrain Erosion tools for Unity. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code. The objective of this Unity Summer of Code project was to develop a toolset for the Unity Editor…

We have a ton of people at Unity who have been or are involved in the demoscene. Assembly is one of the largest demoscene parties, and this year we were sponsoring the event, sent in some folks there and had a couple of seminar presentations. Our presentations were not directly Unity related, but still might…

Unity roadmap blog post said: Currently Unity mixes the fixed function pipeline for vertex lit objects and vertex shaders for pixel lit lights. On Direct3D this creates some rendering artifacts on very close or self intersecting surfaces. We want to end this by implementing a full fixed function emulator in vertex shaders. You won’t have…

For some reason I was browsing through old emails and found some old development screenshots of Unity 2.5. Unity 2.5 was the first version of the editor running on Windows and eventually was released in March 2009. Some development of it started at end of 2007, just after Unity 2.0 was released. First there was…

Almost a month ago I said we’re preparing reports of Unity Web Player hardware statistics. Well, here they are: unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats Operating system versions, desktop resolutions, graphics driver versions, shader models, memory sizes and some more. All broken down by quarter so some sort of “trends” can be seen (sure, changes can be caused by general…

Pretty much everyone knows Valve’s hardware survey – it’s a very valuable resource that shows what hardware the typical “hardcore PC gamer” has (that is, gamers that play Valve’s games). However, the “casual gamer”, which is what Unity games are mostly targeted at, probably has slightly different hardware. “Slightly” being a very relative term of…

People have been asking: why built-in shadows don’t work on Unity’s terrain? (here, here, …) Yes, right now (Unity 2.0.2) they don’t. Why – because we didn’t have time to make them work yet. Both terrain and built-in shadows are new features in Unity 2.0, and those two don’t happen to just work together. Here’s…

Just had this chat conversation: & Aras: whoa Joachim: it rocks Joachim: automatically instantiates material for you Joachim: the same way we do it for scripts Joachim: best thing since sliced bread i think Aras: Aras: hey, back in…

One of our customers found an interesting bug the other day: embedding Unity Web Player into a web page makes some javascript animation libraries not work correctly. For example, script.aculo.us or Dojo Toolkit would stop doing some of their tasks. But only on Windows, and only on some browsers (Firefox and Safari). Wait a moment……

We’ve got a feature we want to do — it’s something we call “intermediate mode render calls”. The idea is that some script could say: Draw( position, rotation, mesh, material ); And that would make the mesh appear with the given material at the given position on the screen, and it would just work with…