Senior QA Specialist Samantha Kalman and the Demo Team have put together a quick introduction of how easy it is to set up your games to use Occlusion Culling in Unity 3.0. We first introduced our own Occlusion Culling system in Unity iPhone 1.0 because we felt it to be an important feature for getting the most out of the platform. We have now stepped it up by seamlessly integrating the leading industry standard Umbra Occlusion Culling technology into Unity and making it available across all platforms that Unity supports.

Enjoy!

In this short video Will Goldstone shows some of the benefits of the new deferred rendering path in Unity 3.0 such as being able to have dozens of lights on screen at the same time without a performance hit as well as using advanced image effects that utilize the same depth and normal textures as deferred rendering.

And stayed tuned for the Occlusion Culling video… we promise it’s almost ready

Senior QA Specialist Samantha Kalman and Demo Team Artist Roald Høyer-Hansen have put together a great introduction of how Beast has been seamlessly integrated into Unity. We hope you enjoy the preview video and are looking forward to all the beautiful scenes people will create using Unity 3′s new lightmapping features!

Enjoy!

In this video Will Goldstone gives us a tour of just some of the new Asset Management features in Unity 3. These include Scene View searching by name and type, the new Object Selector offering vast improvements over the previous method of selecting and assigning Assets, and Asset Labels which greatly speeds up searching and categorizing large projects.

PS- Nicholas would like to personally apologize for the inconsistent GUI scheme in the Object Selector at the time of this recording… it’s still a work in progress after all

For those who were at Unite ’09, this is the racing game that was demoed when showcasing the new profiler in Unity 2.6 during the keynote. The aim of this tutorial is to show you how to create a racing game with Unity. In it, we assemble a car from a 3d model, scripts and Components. The tutorial provides you with a complete project of a driving game, where you can play with a finished scene and explore how everything is put together. We also provide you with a scene that has everything ready but the car, which you will then work on completing.

Section 1 – Assembling the Car

The first section of the tutorial provides details about assembling a Car Prefab from a 3D model, scripts and components. We discuss the basics required to setup the car, including adding collision, shadow settings for the car and skid marks. Upon completing this part of the tutorial, you should have a working knowledge of the Scene and a fully functional driving demo.

Section 2 – Tweaking the Car

“Tweaking the Car”, discusses various aspects of the car’s configuration. In this section, you will learn how to tweak the car to behave “better” or in different ways. The goal of this section is to provide a more thorough understanding of the car setup to allow for customization.

Section 3 – Under the Hood

For those adventurous souls looking to fully customize their ride, the third section of the tutorial digs deep into the scripts that power the car prefab. Here you will find an in-depth assessment of most of the major functions and a walk-through of the actual code that drives the car.

As a bonus, thanks to Unity physics guru and car aficionado, Jonas Echterhoff, we have provided an alternate high-end physically accurate and realistic car model. The simulation does not make use of Unity’s wheel colliders, but instead implements its own wheel collider in script based on Physics.Raycast. The model then uses a Pacejka “Magic Formula”- based tire model to calculate wheel forces to apply to the car, which gives more accurate results.

Download the tutorial and take it for a spin. See you on the open road.

Well ok, we’re not really for hire, we’re actually pretty easy to find, and we’re definitely here to help you make better games with Unity. As the Unity community grows the spectrum of users has widened from the classic bedroom developer up to the large established game studio. Unity’s core philosophy has always been to empower any sized team to make their ideas a reality with an easy to use and powerful tool. Creating top notch documentation, tutorials, and examples goes hand in hand with this philosophy. It facilitates new and veteran users alike to come to grips with new features in Unity as well as how fundamental game concepts are done the “Unity way”.

The relatively new platform of Unity for iPhone has brought a ton of new users to the community and with it a lot of questions about how to develop for this platform effectively. Therefore the first round of demos and tutorials we’ll be doing will be solely focused on getting people up to speed with Unity iPhone. The first one we’re doing is a 3rd person platformer which will teach several techniques for how to control a character as well as the camera. Based upon requests on the forum these will be:

• Touch on the screen to move character to that position in world space.

• “Dual Analog” controls for movement and camera orbit.

• “Single Stick” controls with auto-camera orientation and pinch for zoom in/out.

As you can see from the screenshot we’re also going to be talking about optimizations for the iPhone including draw calls, lighting, character rigging, and colliders. Hopefully these tutorials will be useful to both artists and coders.

The newly formed Demo Team consists of myself (artist), Amir Ebrahimi (programmer), Charles Hinshaw (designer/writer), and Jeff Aydelotte (programmer/technical artist). I can’t speak for my teammates, but I’m always open to hearing suggestions from the community about what you’d like to see from us in the future. We’re here to get you up to speed making the best games you can so feedback about what you think is important is very valuable to us.