The goal for the asset store has always been to be a quick and convenient way to get assets for games. With Unity 3.5, we’re taking a huge stride towards this.

Part of 3.5 is a revamped object picker. The idea is that you will be able to quickly browse and assign all assets in your project – and available online – from one integrated window. Something like this:

The recent release of 3.4 brought many awesome new features to Unity.. with it came a ton of new assets and optimizations to the Unity Asset Store! Here’s a quick look at recent and notable additions to the store.  If you haven’t been to the Unity Asset Store before, you’ll find it inside Unity– just launch Unity and select Window > Asset Store.  It’s an incredibly convenient way to find quality, ready-to-use, royalty-free models, scripts, sound effects, music and editor extensions right in your workspace.  It couldn’t be easier!

Addicted to Substances

Airstream Substance demo project

A mind-blowingly useful new feature in Unity 3.4 is the integration of the dynamic texture generation system, the Allegorithmic Substance engine, directly inside Unity.  If you’re not yet familiar with Substances, you should check them out, as they’re the most efficient way to pack tons of complex textures (with diffuse, specular, normal maps and more) into a very, very small footprint!  You can actually adjust an Allegorithmic Substance’s parameters in run-time with code or even animation keyframes, to create living, dynamic textures which can change over time in your game.   To get started, you’ll need to pick up a pre-existing, incredibly-customizable substance from the Asset Store, which contains the basic procedural patterns for your textures.  Use them like any material on your mesh objects and adjust the parameters as you like!

You will find over 500 pre-made Allegorithmic Substance on the Asset Store, ranging from commonly used textures including metals, woods, sci-fi and fabric, to vivid, organic and alien textures.   Allegorithmic’s system is so addictive, if you’re not careful you might become a substance abuser!  Allegorithmic’s substances can be found in the Materials & Textures section of the Asset Store.  It’s a great way to beef up your project.

We have a free 18-substance pack on the Asset Store as well as a two great example projects to get you going.

Rain{one}

Rain{one} AI behavior tree by Rival{theory}

Popular on the Asset Store this month is the very brainy AI system, Rain{one} from the Los Alamos thinktank, Rival{theory}.  It’s the easiest way to give in-game characters core AI capabilities such as the ability to sense the world, navigate, and create complex behaviors through goal or task based logic. Features include…

1. Pathfinding, Pathfollowing and Path Graph Generation
2. Behavior Trees and Goal Oriented Behaviors
3. Movement & Locomotion
4. Environment Sensors
5. One-Click AI Configuration

It’s a great way to give your zombies some braaaains.

Nature!

Nature Pack

Imagine.. the serenity of soaring trees, blooming wildflowers, the graceful curves of a fern, clouds, the majesty of a stony cliff. A verdant, rolling landscape.  There are many places to find such natural beauty… like Yosemite, the Swiss Alps, and the Unity Asset Store.  Quite popular this month is the comprehensive and well-crafted Nature Pack, which has over 30 trees and bushes, stones, natural textures and more, all prepared for use with Unity’s Terrain System.  You’ll also find mushrooms, wildflowers and trees of many species.

Free tunes from the folks at AudioDraft

The good people at the music crowd-sourcing company, AudioDraft, have recently added three packages of high-production, cost-free and royalty free music for the Asset Store.  Check out their Arcade, Orchestral, and Space themed music packs!

Improved Performance and UI

You might have noticed that the Asset Store has a new look, with a category tree hierarchy system, making it a cinch to find what you’re looking for, or just to browse casually.  There’s also speed optimization and purchase data caching for an easier shopping experience.

Content creators making a bundle!

Last month marked the most recent payout to content creators on the Asset Store, with a couple of our sellers having each earned tens of thousands of dollars.  Distributing and selling content on the Asset Store is a great way to put your skills to work, get your vision out to the Unity community, and making money! We’re always looking for great new content to put on the Asset Store.  We’re on the lookout for great models, complete game projects, editor extensions and tools, script libraries, audio and more.  If you’ve made something awesome, please send it our way!

Unity 3.4

We’re about to enter release candidate 1 with Unity 3.4, which is a feature + bugfix release. Here are some highlights:

Allegorithmic Substance integration

Procedural textures are built directly into Unity. Substance procedural textures can be tweaked in Unity. You can even update your textures at run time. It can be used for anything from ageing effects on textures to customizable characters.

Shadow improvements

Directional lights got a new shadow projection mode called “Stable Fit”. Now there’s no more shadow boundary shimmering when rotating the camera!
Regarding optimizations, we cull shadow casters much better now, which means fewer draw calls. Shadow culling can also use occlusion culling data.

Skinning performance & multicore

Skinning performance is 2-3x faster on PCs due to SSE2 optimizations and multicore improvements. There’s also multithreaded skinning for the latest iOS and Android devices.

Downloadable content with caching for complete scenes and asset bundles

This is a cross-platform  feature including iOS and Android that’s perfect for downloadable content. Asset bundles and even complete scenes can be downloaded on demand and cached locally. The caching API gives you full control over when to download a newer version of the asset. Using the caching API dramatically reduces memory usage and has a huge impact on load times.

Script execution order

Unity now gives you eplicit control over the execution order in your scripts. Awake, OnEnable and Update calls are sorted by execution order. Execution order can be defined on a ‘per script’ basis in an easy-to-understand dialog.

Animation & skinned mesh bounding volumes

Pre-computed bounding volumes for skinned meshes & animations let you have more animated characters in your scene.

Graphics optimizations

We implemented various graphics optimizations, ranging from faster deferred lighting (due to more compact light shapes & better occlusion culling) to faster OpenGL ES 2.0 and more mobile optimized shaders.
Last but not least: Terrain works on iOS and Android now.

Image effects & water

There’s a big upgrade to image effects & water. Both have been optimized for performance and, at the same time, visual quality has been improved. They’re also easier to tweak for artists.

Unity Xbox 360 and PS3 release in parallel

All console versions are now released at same time as 3.4. and projects can easily be moved between all platforms.

Rochard, our first PS3 game, has just gone through the Sony submission process.

Better gizmo/handle control

You no longer need to code to add icons to your game objects. Now you can simply set the icon in the game object inspector to quickly see and select things in your scene view. If you want to see icons for tools like pathfinding nodes, just set the icon on the node script in your project and they’ll all show up in the scene.

You can also toggle the display of handles on a per-component basis so now there’s no need to hold back when writing custom editors.

Fast collider tweaking

If you select a collider and hold down Shift, small dots for resizing the colliders will appear. This makes it really quick to set up efficient collision levels so they run really fast on mobile devices.

Hundreds of minor improvements and fixes

Unity 3.4 also has loads of smaller improvements, shine-ups and fixes.

Next release: Unity 3.5

This year we’re focusing on enabling you to push all platforms to their limits. Unity is the most optimized game engine for mobile devices and we’re working hard to also make this true of all other platforms. It’s a big step for Unity to support AAA productions. We have tons of performance optimizations, better multi-threading and a big graphics engine upgrade. At the same time, we are also improving work flows, especially when working in larger teams. Unity 3.5 is a late summer / fall 2011 release.

Please note that the features in this roadmap are not commitments! They may or may not end up in a final release. If a feature isn’t ready in time it will not be included in the release.

Multithreaded renderer

We will be moving most of the rendering workload and driver overhead away from the main Unity thread and onto another CPU core. This is an ongoing project that is currently working on the PC but we plan to make it available on all multicore platforms, from desktop to mobiles. Plus, we’re going for wider multicore utilization (using as many CPUs as there are) for tasks like culling and particle systems. How much of this is ready for 3.5 and on which platforms is still an open question, but we can say that the performance gains look very promising!

Pathfinding

Unity will automatically generate navigation meshes from your level geometry.
Beautiful, natural-looking crowd simulation using RVO and PLE algorithms wrapped in a simple API. Agents can find paths to target locations with built-in crowd simulation, or can be moved directly on the NavMesh in a similar way to the character controller.

New particle system

We re-wrote our particle system from scratch. The new particle system is completely curve and gradient driven, and is composed of modular blocks to boost functionality. Also, it utilizes multicore CPUs on all platforms!

UI framework

We’re rewriting the in-game GUI system from the ground. We’ve made it simple and intuitive to create modern game interfaces with tons of animations and other effects. Everything is assembled in a visual GUI editor. A lot of effort is going into optimizing the GUI system for minimizing run-time overhead through automatic texture atlases and aggressive coverage-based batching.

Light probes for character lighting

Light probes are an advanced technique for lighting dynamic objects and characters with high-quality baked lighting. We capture incoming direct and bounced lighting within a scene at a number of points (light probes). As a character moves through the scene, nearby probes are picked, interpolated, and the result is then passed to the shader to light the surface. It’s a hard problem to do all this efficiently but thanks to our tetrahedra-based space division, the technique is extremely fast even on mobiles and has a very low memory footprint. For more details check out the video and blog post.

RNM lightmaps

To add more flexibility to our lightmapping solution we’re adding the option to bake directional lightmaps (radiosity normal maps and similar schemes). That will also enable bump and specular effects on surfaces lit by indirect light only.

LOD support

Built-in Level Of Detail support. LODs are currently authored manually in your favorite modelling tool but we’re also experimenting with automatic LOD generation techniques.

Intuitive editor tools for setting and inspecting LODs are included as well as integration into the pipeline to automatically create LODs based on naming conventions. We’re also offering support for fading level of detail transitions using screen-space dithering. Get more information in this blog post.

Integrated Perforce and Subversion version control

We’re working on fully integrated version control support for both Perforce and Subversion. There’s a complete UI including support for file locking.

Text-based scene/prefab/… format

Unity will now write all data in a text-based file format for scenes, prefabs, materials and other binary files in your project folder. The format is based on YAML and is optimized for being easy to merge. Multiple team members can work on a scene at the same time and merge the resulting changes afterwards.

Prefabs

The prefab system has been rewritten. It allows you to add and remove components without breaking prefab connections. Materials can be instantiated with the prefab instance. This paves the way for nested prefabs.

Profile & allocator improvements

A new allocator framework helps us reduce memory usage and fragmentation and improve performance. Now there’s a much better memory overview in Unity’s Profiler.

GameCenter and social APIs

We are working on a pluggable social API with backends for Facebook and Apple Game Center.
Companies like OpenFeint or publishers with custom social platforms can easily create their own implementation. This makes it easier to port games between platforms.

Audio

We are working on low latency audio buffer access. This will enable you to write your own filters, effects or make the audio data precisely affect your application or let your application dynamically mix and procedurally generate audio samples.

Microphone support will also be introduced across all platforms. Microphone input can be accessed transparently as an AudioClip.

WebCam support

We’re adding support for streaming video from cameras or other input devices into a texture to allow you to develop augmented reality games, or for uploading pictures for integration with social networks or other online services. This was implemented at our last NinjaCamp week.

Umbra sPVS rewrite

Umbra’s sPVS occlusion culling system has been rewritten from scratch. The algorithm now guarantees conservative PVS results and baking PVS is around 10x faster.

And loads more!

As usual, we fully expect Unity 3.5 to deliver tons of other small features, improvements and fixes.

More future features that we’re currently working on. They don’t have a specific release yet

Again, the fact that we are working on it is not a promise that it will ship in a matter of weeks. We just want you to know what we’re trying to do. Some plans might change!

Flash export support

As announced, we are hard at work to add support for building a Unity project that can be played back by a browser equipped with the Flash “Molehill” plugin. We’ll bring as many Unity features to the Flash Player as we can, and aim to be the very best tool available for people who want to target the 3D functionality in the new Flash Player.

Cache server

Everyone loves Unity’s completely automatic asset pipeline and the ability to quickly modify any asset in your project folder without jumping through hoops.

But when working in larger teams, everyone has to import the same assets again and again. If it could only be 3000x faster to import all assets… We have a solution for that. Early prototypes show that we can import a project folder with 1GB of assets in 9 seconds.

HDR & gamma correct rendering

Built-in HDR, proper linear space lighting. Making the pipeline, the shaders and the render targets work together to produce the output that artists anticipated. It’s a tricky area to get right across all platforms – which is why we want to solve it for you!

Texture streaming

We’ve been working on a texture streaming solution. Unity will load the textures at the necessary resolution just before it needs it. You have a texture memory budget which Unity will fill with the most important textures necessary. Unity automatically analyzes your scene but you can also manually specify the needed textures & resolutions at specific locations in your game.

This means you can have more textures at a higher resolution, especially on mobile devices and consoles. Unity automatically analyzes your scene to allow for prefetching of textures. Even on iOS we’re able to stream textures in the background at 60FPS.

Audio improvements

FMOD designer support: Import FMOD designer banks (.FSB) and event files (.FEV) and access them as standard audio clips.

Audio DSP graph: Get full access to the mixer engine and create custom routing and advanced signal chains either from a visual node editor or through a simple API.

Dynamic mixing: Mixing audio seems to be the big issue in today’s audio field. We’re working on a dynamic mixing solution that lets you group audio sources and mix them, apply effects, modulations and save these settings as snapshots. You can trigger the snapshots from script or from animations at any time. This makes it easy to duck audio and precisely control the audio levels at all times.

This is only part of what we are working on. We’re also developing more features that are much further away from completion. So stay tuned!

This month’s most popular newcomer to the Unity Asset Store is without a doubt Hard Surface Shaders Pro, by Bruno Rime, which brings photo-realistic  metallic, glossy and glassy surfaces to your models.

Hard Surface Shaders Pro by Bruno Rime

This stunning set of shaders provide real-time screen-space reflection & refraction, chromatic aberration, and multiple shadows in forward rendering for a look previously achievable only by ray-tracing.  Adorable robots and grinning evil skulls love Hard Surface Shaders Pro– and we think you will too!

Also popular this month is SimplePath, by Alex Kring.  This set of simple-but-effective scripts provide an rock-solid real-time pathfinding system for NPCs and enemies.  With SimplePath, your enemies will figure out the best way around buildings, moving objects, other characters and uneven terrain surface, to hit their target.  Definitely the easiest-to-use pathfinding system I’ve seen in a long time, and the example scenes have practically everything needed to get your zombies going.

Not only will you find other top selling items, like Antares Vizio, Playmaker, or the brilliant Mixamo Animation Store, you’ll find hundreds of different models, textures, tutorials and audio tracks, all guaranteed to work perfectly with Unity, royalty free! There’s weird, wacky, and wonderful creatures. Planes, trains, and automobiles.  Heroes. Heroines.  Buildings and props for nearly any game setting.  And if you’re a modeller, coder, pixel wrangler, sound designer or other talented and prolific creator of content, we can help you sell or freely distribute your work– send it our way!

Here’s some of the newest and most notable items on the store today…

Mega-Fiers – Mesh deformations in Unity

Get bent with the most exciting new addition to the store this week, Chris West’s Mega-Fiers. Think Modifiers, except more Mega, this collection of real-time, programmatic mesh deformers is inspired by 3DSMax’s deformation modifiers. Bend, twist, taper, inflate, melt, stretch, ripple, squash, mutilate, even perform lattice deformations on meshes right inside Unity. You can animate and procedurally change deformer parameters, enabling real-time dynamic deformations during runtime.

Terrain 4 Mobile brings high quality terrains to mobile platforms. As many of you know, conventional multi-texture terrains are too computationally expensive for mobile GPUs to handle. This fantastic tool will essentially convert a standard Unity terrain normally used on a PC or console game into a high-performance terrain mesh ideal for iOS and Android, giving you the same visual effect without a performance hit.  Speaking of hits….

RageSpline – Vector Drawing in Unity

All the rage! The top-selling newcomer to the store is RageSpline, which allows conventional vector-style drawing in Unity, while at the same time adding depth and volume to your drawings, so they automatically work with Unity’s physics system.  Texture your RageSpline creations with gradients, solid colors or image textures. With RageSpline you can actually create an entire game-level’s worth of meshes and artwork entirely inside Unity. If you’re familiar with Illustrator or any other vector-drawing style art tool, you’ll find yourself right at home with this great new tool.

Playmaker: Game development without coding

Hutong Games’ Playmaker, the number one tool for making game logic without programming, continues to be the extension of choice for developers who’d rather create game logic visually.  Intuitive and user friendly, Playmaker is a great alternative to conventional programming.

Mixamo expands database and search functionality

With a growing library of animation and newly-released search system, finding the right animation in Unity has become even easier with improvements to the Mixamo store plugin.   Drag your character into the Mixamo UI right inside Unity, search through the growing archive of animations, customize and preview the actual motion in-game and purchase it on the store in just a matter of minutes.  It’s the tool your animators don’t want you to know about!

New Audio Category Reverberates the Asset Store

We’re thrilled to introduce the new Audio category, featuring high-quality, royalty-free music and sound effects.  Sound design can make or break a game, yet quality audio can be hard for the smaller developer to obtain.  Don’t settle for your friend’s Casio keyboard or take a chance with unlicensed music, when you can find quality instrumental music on the Asset Store for your game.  Sound producer AudioMicro is quickly becoming our top audio provider, with excellent royalty-free sound effects and affordable, pro-quality music, from action and adventure to mind-shredding rock!

Free Stuff Rules!

We’ve got a very large collection of free assets too– and some are quite impressive!  Top freebies this month include awesome iTween animation system, which can be used to move game objects without code, the very informative and useful C# Game Examples generously brought to you by M2H, and Strumpy Shader Editor, a powerful node-based shader editor with a quirky name.  If you’re considering making an MMO, check out the free Photon Boot Camp demo project, which includes a non-expiring 20-seat server license for Exit Games’ Photon server.

1) Create assets. 2) Sell on Asset Store. 3) Profit.

If you’ve created models, textures, audio, scripts or tools to sell or distribute for free on the Unity Asset Store, get in touch and make some bucks! The Asset Store is a great way to share with the developer community and monetize your skills.

Don’t just take our word for it, read Juha Kiili’s awesome Bragpost(tm).

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

No, that’s not Conan O’Brien, it’s Brady Wright, our first quarter’s top seller on the Unity Asset Store! If you’re not familiar with his products, check out EZ-GUI and Sprite Manager.

You too can win an 8′  x 2′ check and utterly perplex your bank teller! Submit your content to the Unity Asset Store!

A huge congratulations,  Brady, from all of us at Unity Technologies.

One of the most popular newcomers is NeoPax’s VIZIO, which has taken off like a rocket!  VIZIO is a node-based logic editor which will feel quite friendly to anyone who has ever used Virtools.  Their motto “Imagination + Create Art + Draw Blocks + Create the Game” pretty much sums up the workflow VIZIO brings to the Unity developer. VIZIO is the second node-based editor on the Asset Store, preceded by Hutong Games’ popular PlayMaker, another top-selling visual node-based-editor.

If the reactions on the forum and in-store reviews are any indicator, both editors appear to be quite successful already.  If you’re looking for an alternative to text-based scripting, check these two powerful new tools out!

One of my personal new favorites this month is iGui by Avam Studios, the first true WYSIWYG gui editor on the Asset Store. With iGui, you create user interfaces the visual way– dragging and placing GUI elements from the iGui toolbar directly into the game window.  It features nested containers, various alignment settings, draggable windows, drop-down menus, buttons, ready-to-go mobile slider panels and much more.  When a user interacts with these elements, it calls events which you specify right in the inspector window. Truly fantastic for UI artists, iGui allows you to create great interfaces without ever having to touch the OnGUI event in code– and if you don’t know what OnGUI means, this is UI tool for you! Once you have it, you’ll never imagine UI design in Unity without it.  It’s completely compatible with UnityGUI skins, so you can easily customize the UI style as you please–  and don’t forget, we have a growing assortment of UnityGUI Skins on the Asset Store too!

Edy's Vehicle Physics

Also on the incredibly-hot-asset-list is Edy’s Vehicle Physics, by the mysterious content provider known simply as Edy(tm).  Whoever he or she is, Edy has done a fine job creating a vehicle editing system with results which (according to some reviewers) surpass the driving experience in the GTA(tm) series. Quite a claim!  Personally I find it quite a lot of fun and relatively straightforward to create realistically behaved vehicles– from slow, lumbering, heavy school buses to slick, high performance sports cars.  Not only does it provide a great framework and editor for designing your vehicles, it also comes with four well-made prefab vehicles which you can adapt to your needs. Definitely one of the best vehicle editors on the Asset Store.  If you’re making a game with any kind of land vehicle, Edy’s Vehicle Physics is going to be a huge timesaver.

Mixamo’s in-editor plugin continues to be a popular way for animating characters right inside Unity.  Simply drag your rigged character from the Hierarchy View right into the Mixamo plugin window, you might have to do a bit of bone retargeting with a few clicks (easy), and suddenly your character is tapped into terabytes of animation data on the Mixamo database!  With some adjustment to sliders, you can procedurally adapt the animation’s movement and cadence to suit your character, right in the Unity editor, whether it’s a lumbering, slow moving giant or a little mouse!

Don’t forget– if you’re a modeler, artist, sound designer, scripter, or hardcore programmer, you can sell your content to nearly 20K registered Asset Store users.  Submit your masterpiece to the Unity Asset Store!

As you may know, the Unity editor environment is at its core incredibly extensible.  An over-arching part of the design philosophy is to allow and encourage talented developers to create new features, integrated at a level deeper than the simple plug-in architecture you find in other software.  Editor extensions can sit so tightly and integrate so directly in the environment that you might think they were new features in the tool from our own internal development team. I’m not just saying that—see for yourself! We have two new Editor Extensions in the Unity Asset Store which both radically change the Unity workflow and exemplify the power of Unity’s plug-in architecture.

First, the Mixamo Animation store plugin, which allows you to procedurally animate your character inside Unity, within minutes!  Once you’e downloaded the free plugin, you’ll find a new Mixamo pane under the Window menu item.  Drag your rigged model from the Project Pane into the Mixamo window and go through a quick retargeting process.  Once that’s in place, you can browse Mixamo’s enormous animation archive right in Unity.  Press preview and watch the animation play on your character directly in the Unity editor!  With a few sliders you can adjust various animation parameters, so that your animation perfectly suits your character’s body—no hands penetrating the head, for example.  You can make a walk surly and aggressive, or fine tune it to a quirky jog.  This is the kind of thing I myself, as an armchair animator, have slaved over in Motionbuilder for my own game.  Those days are over!  Cut your animation budget and schedule dramatically with this revolutionary new tool.  Mixamo has put up a how-to video if you’d like to get a head start.

As much of a paradigm shift as the Mixamo plug-in, the ingenious Playmaker Visual Logic editor has arrived to change the way you code!  This kind of editor is something I’ve personally wanted in our product for some time—and in true Asset Store rock star form, Huton Games beat us to it!  With Playmaker, you can visually script game logic using nodes, transition events, and access to nearly the entire Unity API  in an elegant finite state machine.

You can literally program without… er.. programming?  From simple trigger-based events to extremely complex and sophisticated gameplay behavior, you can do it with Playmaker.  Since you can augment its library of methods and actions with your own standard Unity scripts,  you can pretty much do anything with it!

Playmaker revolutionizes how you program.  Mixamo, how you animate.  Both of these new extensions offer so many powerful new features that it would practically warrant a new version number for Unity, if we had created them ourselves.  They’re here to save you time and offer you great flexibility.   To take advantage of this new power, launch the Unity Editor.  You’ll find the Asset Store listed under the Window menu.

You’ll not only find editor extensions like Playmaker and Mixamo, you’ll also find (*deep breath*) racing cars, aircraft carriers, MMO networking templates, grand pianos, animated cats, rats, wolves and horses, water buoyancy simulation systems, electronic magazines, zombies, goblins, PHP scripts, social media integration APIs, toilets, terrain tools, web serialization kits, asset bundle management tools, dragons, node-based shader editors, c# programming tutorials, Javascript to c# converters, dungeon templates, rifles, explosion and particle collections, pathfinding systems, Baroque French bath tubs and a heck of a lot more.

We are very happy to announce that Unity Android and Unity Android Pro are now available!

Head here to download a trial and read on for extra info on what is included.

Naturally, Android fits straight into the editor like all the other platforms, so its incredibly simple to take your existing games and port them directly over to the new build target. Exactly like the iOS remote, we also have Android remote, which lets you test out your game on the fly.

We have also been working closely with the various android hardware manufacturers to ensure we get lightning fast performance in all areas.

Its also worth noting that since we released the preview version of Android Pro, we’ve already had developers working on nearly 50 real-world projects and seen great successes for guys like Madfinger games with Samurai II: Vengeance.

We are also keeping the same pricing model that we have with iOS. So Unity Android is $400 and the Unity Android Pro is $1500.

Finally, You can get hold of an Android Pro license for free! We are running a competition to give away 4 Android Pro licenses, In order to get hold of them, either become a fan of the Unity Page on facebook or follow us on twitter. Then make a comment on facebook or re-tweet the launch announcement with a sentence to explain why you thing the license should be yours. Read more about the contest here.

These are exciting times. Today, at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco (of which we’re proud Gold Sponsors), Adobe has announced the public availability of a beta version of the Flash Player, codenamed Molehill, that has a very interesting new feature: hardware accelerated 3D support.

Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware. Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools, etc.

Hmmm….does that list sound familiar? It sounds a lot like what you all love Unity for!

In the past few months, our engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity. That investigation has gone very well, and we’re moving into full production.

For Unity users, this no doubt spurs a lot of questions. Questions such as:

• Will Unity on Flash support the full Unity feature set?
• When will it be ready?
• Okay, when will a beta be ready?
• What will it cost?
• Will it do A, B or C?

These, and many other questions, we cannot answer just yet.  We can say that it will be as good as we can make it and we’ll do it as fast as we can do it.

We do however have some concrete answers for you now that shouldn’t wait…

Q. Is this the end of the Unity’s own Web Player?

Absolutely not. The Flash and Unity Web Players both have their strengths.  We’re excited by the opportunity to target the Flash Player and all of its features with Unity, but there will be plenty of experiences that the Unity plugin is better suited for. It will be up to developers in the end, to decide whether they want to target only the Flash Player, only the Unity Web Player, or some combination of the two (now things are getting interesting!)

Q. What programming language will I use?

You’ll have two options:

1. For people with a Flash background:
   Target our ActionScript API directly from Flash. Think:
   var go:GameObject = new GameObject(“Just normal ActionScript 3 code”);
2. For people with a Unity background:
   Script your content in C# / JavaScript / Boo, like you’re used to, and have Unity automatically translate it to ActionScript when you hit publish.

This is an important development for us, and we hope you’re as excited as we are to see your content reach further than ever.

Over the last week, there’s been some awesome new additions which I personally find very exciting… my favorite currently being Object Cutter by Teimuraz Kokiashvili. It slices and dices meshes dynamically in runtime like a ninja wearing a suit of razorblades! Simply define an object as a cutter, another as a slice-able mesh and it produces a clean slice right where they intersect– breaking a single mesh into multiple pieces. It works and performs surprisingly well, and also features optional automatic gory effects! Perfect for dynamically slicing zombies/players/trees/giant tomatoes. Also worth noting, VisGames has been tearing up the Asset Store with some amazingly high-quality and affordable models– from trains to gravestones to.. what could be described as my ex-boyfriend’s bathroom.

EzGui by Brady Wright puts GUI elements directly in your game.

We also have a very moving announcement: the Asset Store will soon feature packs containing thousands of motion capture files, completely free and right at your fingertips! (Get it? Moving announcement?) Derived from motion capture data made available by the Carnegie Mellon Motion Capture Library and the Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Designs (ACCAD) Motion Capture Lab, this data has been converted by the amazing Jennifer Longe to a Unity-friendly FBX format and will work immediately and directly inside Unity with any Character Studio skeleton!  Thanks, Jennifer!

If you’ve never heard of the Unity Asset Store, you’ll find it right inside the Unity editor! Just choose Window > Asset Store, create an account (a few steps) and check out what we offer! If you’re a content creator and interested in submitting your work, show us what you’ve got!

We would like to thank all the wonderfully talented and creative people who have chosen to share and sell their content on the store, and developers everywhere who are using and hopefully finding meaningful benefit from the Asset Store! We’re not just here to sell models and scripts, we’re also here to create momentum and empowerment for artists, programmers, dreamers and designers who are passionate about game design.

We’ll be presenting more information in person about the Asset Store at the GDC in San Francisco– feel free to look for us there! If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to contact me! Thanks!

I’m thrilled to join the Unity team as the new Developer Relations Director focused on our Union business unit. My enviable job is to work with our great developers to find and deliver games to emerging and existing markets through the technical, business and marketing services of Union.

In case you missed the big news this week, Sony Ericsson has announced an amazing gaming-centric Android phone called Xperia PLAY. Unity played a key role in their announcement, and you’ll hear more technical details around this partnership at the upcoming Game Developer Conference. As a brief overview, Unity worked with Sony Ericsson to expose their unique PlayStation style gaming controls through Unity’s Android support. Unity developers interested in learning more about our support for the Xperia PLAY in Unity can contact us at union@unity3d.com. You can also read more about our partnership at the Sony Ericsson’s Developer Blog.

Three of our hard working developers jumped at the chance to update their games with these controls and were previewed at the launch event. Our hearty thanks to Angry Mob Games, Luma Arcade and Art In Games for their quick and impressive efforts.

Union plays a unique role in this Sony Ericsson announcement. While all Android games built with Unity will work well with the Xperia PLAY, Sony Ericsson wants to see enhanced and differentiated games. Our developers participating in Union are the perfect targets, as they want their content to be best suited for new devices and platforms. Through the business and marketing strength of Union, we’re able to offer Sony Ericsson a steady stream of optimized games. These Union games will be highlighted to Xperia PLAY owners. And as we all know, titles which get visibility are much more likely to reach game players. It’s a true win-win for Union developers and Sony Ericsson.

The Union team will be attending the upcoming Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Feb 28 – Mar 4, 2011. Please send us a meeting request at union@unity3d.com, or just stop by our tradeshow booth for a chat. And as always, drop us an email if you want to learn more and get involved with Union. We have many more exciting opportunities coming.

I look forward to seeing what you create with Unity!

We launched Unity Asset Store during the Unite keynote on November 10th and to celebrate our 3 months anniversary and over 10,000 registered users, we’ve made a small but important addition to the store. You can now create links to packages in the store and post them on the web.

Creating the links is simple. Open the Asset Store window inside Unity and find the package you want to link to, then click on one of the three sharing buttons. The Facebook and Twitter buttons require little explanation. Simply click on one of them to blast a message to your favorite social network. The link button on the left can be used in case you simply want the raw URL for your website or anywhere you can post a link.

We think this is a great way for developers to promote and create interest around their products. It will also be extremely useful for sharing recommendations with others. For instance, here’s a list of the top 5 most downloaded packages on the Asset Store this week:

1. iTween Visual Editor By David Koontz
2. iTween By Pixelplacement
3. C# game examples By M2H
4. Road and Path Tool By Six Times Nothing
5. River Tool By Six Times Nothing

Note that you need to have Unity 3.2 installed in order to open the Asset Store from these links. Upgrade or install it now if you haven’t already done so.

We are so happy to announce that Unity 3.2 is now live and available to download!

Here is a rundown of the major new features and improvements:

For a full list of all of the updates fixes and improvements, head over to the release notes.

Or simply go directly to the download link here and get stuck in with all the cool new stuff.

Our shader ninja has been hard at work, forging a great new set of effects with a host of exposed settings to allow full customization of your Unity project.

In the scene we have a bunch of awesome new and upgraded effects including:

Vignetting
Depth Of Field (Bokeh)
Bloom And Flares
Sun Shafts

Anyway, enough talk… lets see what you will receive in the 3.2 update!

Love,
The Demo Team

Precision of Shader Computations
Unity 3.2 makes much better use of different precision shader computations in OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders. This alone results in a 50%-150% speed increase on more complex shaders. Our GLSL Translator & Optimizer has been extended so that float/half/fixed types in Cg map to highp/mediump/lowp precision in GLSL, and we’ve updated all built-in shaders to use appropriate precision.

Normal Mapping
We’ve made several tweaks to make normal mapping faster. On desktops, we use “DXT5nm” compression for normal maps, where two normal components are stored and third is computed in the shader – this works great because it allows using DXT5 on the normalmaps. However, the extra computation is not very good for mobile platforms, so we’ve changed the normal map compression scheme there. We’ve also implement assembly optimized skinning for normal mapped meshes — this is now 4x faster than before.

Built-In Shaders
Unity 3.2 will ship with new shaders that are optimized variants of existing built-in shaders. You’ll be able to find them under the “Mobile” category (but they work on other platforms as well!). These new shaders have a few limitations, but the upside is increased performance — the Mobile/Bumped Specular, for example, is 5.2x faster than the Bumped Specular currently shipping in Unity 3.1 (tested on iOS).

Other Optimizations
There are a number of other improvements that make Unity-created mobile content run faster in 3.2. For example, we’ve optimized the internals of the OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer for lower CPU overhead. We’ve also changed how Unity handles alpha-testing so that those objects are rendered after all fully opaque ones. These and other tweaks and adjustments are all designed to help you get the most out of your mobile game.

Press Control-9 (Windows) or Cmd-9 (OSX) to launch the Unity Asset Store browser

Wow. Over the last two weeks we’ve launched an outstanding addition of over 40 new assets ready to use in your game projects!  This brings our total number of asset store packages to over 170, and the submissions keep coming in!  Whether you need extra assets to add more detail and decor to your scene, models and animations for players and NPCs, extensions to enhance editor functionality, or a complete project to retool for your own purposes,  the Asset Store has content that will both save you time and enhance your projects. Almost everything new to the store is exciting, but there are a few especially outstanding offerings.

Mixamo Animation and Character Packs
Mixamo brings several characters and matching animation packs to the asset store.  You’ll find almost everything you’ll need for third person and NPC character action in these kits.  Most impressive, in my opinion, is their amazing Mixamo Dragon pack.  Featuring two AAA quality, rigged and animated dragons, this pack is jaw-droppingly good.   As a player character, an enemy for a boss-fight, a fantasy background character, or extreme marshmallow roaster, your game will be on fire with these stunning dragons!

Age of Sails
This pack of highly stylized, well-crafted frigates, ships and barges will work great in any RTS, sailing or pirate game, or just for packing your harbors and oceans.  They weigh in at a triangle-count low enough for usage on any mobile device, but are so well textured and modeled to look great in any platform.

Unisky
Six times Nothing (aka 000000) brings an innovative extension that I believe will be put to use in games everywhere, UniSky.  UniSky is a great solution which can generate procedurally animated skies with 24-hour day/night cycles (with moon, sun and stars), atmospheric scattering, procedural 2D clouds and parameters for weather (including precipitation!).  There’s a great demand for this functionality in all kinds of games, and no reason to reinvent the wheel– especially now that Six Times Zero has done it so well!

Other awesome packages worth checking out include…

Pacific Aircraft Pack
It’s 1943 all over again with Digital Lightbox’s highly professional Pacific Aircraft Pack.  Need a B17 Flying Fortress for your game?  How about a Nakajima Ki-43?  We got em!  Pro enough for any platform, light enough for a mobile game.   Check them out!

MultiPanel by Owlchemy Labs
The great owlchemists at Owlchemy Labs have created a wonderful time-saver–  Multipanel.  This editor extension allows you to apply common actions on multiple objects in your hierarchy at the same time– things you would normally have to do manually, including toggling, resetting, adding, removing, tagging, and more.  Just $5!

Crates – Love em, hate em, can’t live without em.
Okay. Let’s cut to the chase– we all love and hate crates.  But the inescapable fact is that you need them.  Explode them, hide behind them, push them around, drop them, and stuff them in warehouses.  Use the best ones out there– namely the crate-tastic Ultimate Crate Pack by 3D Attack.

Enrich developers, enrich yourself!
Our top sellers are making thousands of dollars a month. Got something mind-blowing, time-saving or awe-inspiring?  Submit it to the Unity Asset Store and make some money while you’re at it.  Although we’re a bit picky about quality, if you think you’ve got it, send your stuff our way!  For more information, just click here: http://unity3d.com/unity/editor/asset-store-submit

As a developer, the Unity Asset Store can save you money, time, and enable you to do things that were previously out of your reach.  Imagine the following game scenario: your warrior heroes have been adventuring through dense forest wilderness and set up camp in a clearing, sitting before a warm, crackling campfire. Distant roaring is heard! Moments later a pack of sword-wielding homicidal pirate goblins come tearing into the camp on Harley Davidson motorcycles.  With swords and battle axes swinging, your adventurers engage the pirate goblin bikers in awesome battle, dodging lasers and tire irons!  Finally you take them all down in a glorious explosion with a grenade launcher! Perfect idea for a game, right? (if you use it, I want to be in the credits -CM)

The necessary models, animation and textures seem beyond your resources? No worries!  Launch Unity and open the Asset Store window (Window > Asset Store) and find time-saving assets to get going! First you need to get your Adventurers in order. Check out Art Packages > Warriors And Commoners, by Frogames. In this best-selling package, you’ll find an assortment of configurable, professional quality, rigged and animated adventurer characters ready to go.  There are so many combinations of configurations, you find a style that suits your game uniquely. You grab our own Free Terrain Assets package, as well as Art Packages > Shanty Town Trees and artfully lay out your forest in less than an hour. A few clicks later you find the perfect campfire, by Unity Magic, complete with crackling sounds, smoke and dancing flames, saving hours of work. After clicking Download & Import, moments later your campfire is in your project and ready to use in your scene.

“But surely,” you say, “Unity does not have Pirate Biker Goblins on the Asset Store!” We look you knowingly in the eye and guide you to the Dungeon Guardians package, featuring professional quality, ready-to-go goblins. With a little texture work in Photoshop, you add classic leather biker chaps, evil mustaches and menacing eye-patches to the characters. Throw in your own peg-leg and hook-hand as meshes to complete the look. “This is unbelievably awesome!” you say, as you dive deeper and find that the battle axes, swords, and motorcycles are really just a download away. For the amazing boss-fight explosions, you download and import the stunning Detonator explosion package. Which is free, by the way.  Suddenly your project has professional quality artwork and effects in place, allowing you to focus on the important work – unleashing your creative vision upon the world!

For Content Creators, the Unity Asset Store is a fantastic way to publish, distribute and monetize your hard work – it’s a quick and effective gateway to connect with a rapidly growing base of game designers!  Because your customers can download and use assets directly in the Unity Editor,  your content is easy to purchase and immediately usable.

As of this blog posting, we’ve just released a brand new Asset Store Tools submission package. Check it out and show us what you’ve got!

Sure, the Unity Asset Store is an awesome resource for game designers and a great way to make money for content creators.  But it’s not just a place to buy and sell tanks, trees and scripts, it’s an exchange of creativity, ingenuity, and passion.  You’ll find the Asset Store waiting for you under the Window menu directly in the Unity Editor.

We were off to a fantastic start of Unite yesterday! We sold out with 650 participants – nearly double the size of last year’s conference but were able to make space for everyone (though the keynote session ended up being standing room only for the latecomers!)

The live stream of the keynote did work for many, but for many others it didn’t. We’re so sorry about that, but now it’s been posted here: http://unity3d.com/unite/keynote

We made two gigantic announcements here. First, we announced the Unity Asset Store, a digital store so you can share and trade assets – and monetize your skills in a new way. The Unity Asset Store is embedded inside the Unity editor and will act as a hub for you to find free and commercial independently created assets for use in your games and other interactive 3D projects.

Second, we announced Union, a new business unit that will bring your Unity games to new platforms and channels and create new revenue streams for you. We have encountered a huge thirst for great games from a huge range of platforms, and a broad range of these opportunities are currently only being captured by large game publishers. With Union, we can help the smaller developers band together to approach these opportunities as one. We see Union as a further step on the road to the democratization of game development – a road that started with technology but can go much further.

And then Jesse Schell was our keynote guest speaker, and blew our mind with his fresh new talk about The Future of Virtual Characters. I’m so amazed by Jesse: yesterday was the third time I’ve heard him speak, and while his talks are always super dense and full of ideas and most amazingly I haven’t yet heard him repeat himself. Like, at all!

Gamasutra’s Chris Nutt did a great write-up here in case you missed and want to check out: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31469/Unite_10_Jesse_Schell_And_The_Future_Of_Virtual_Characters.php

We’re so excited to see where you’re going to take this all and want to thank you for making all of this possible! Yay and double yay

As you can see, we released Unity 3 to the world today. It’s a an incredibly awesome release: both in and by itself, but also in what it means in terms of our broad vision of bringing the best game technology to everyone. And you are part of that group… well, we all are!

There’s loads more to say, but today I’ll make it short: as the release came out of the blue this morning at 8.30am California time (GMT+8), we are extending the “pre order” rebate for 24 hours. So it’ll expire at 9am California time tomorrow.

So if you were planning to make use of the pre order rebate then hurry on over and order Unity 3 now: https://store.unity3d.com/shop/

Lots of love!

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!

Hey guys and gals.

Super-happy news here from Unity HQ: Unity 3 is nearly ready – the beta testers and preview customers got their hands on the RC1 build a few days ago. This means we’re wrapping up this cycle and shipping soon.

It also means that our pre-order rebate is about to expire, so now is your last chance to pick up Unity 3 at the discounted price. Head over to the Unity 3 page to see more about it, or go straight to the store to buy your copy today!

I can’t wait to finally get this out there – it’s been a tremendous release. A few random stats: over 40 man-years of effort went into Unity 3, and over 100,000 hours of beta testing activity has taken place. Thanks to all of you who helped us out!

Happy coding

It’s been 5 months since Apple announced the new iOS 4.0 Terms of Service which seemed like they might block out Unity (as well as similar technologies) from their AppStore.

We commented on this right away (in a first, second, and third installment), and after some deliberation we even invented a workaround that we might employ in case Apple ever stopped approving Unity-base apps.

All along Apple kept approving every single Unity game submitted to the AppStore – several per day – and even featuring some of them highly, so it was clear that Apple never stopped liking the results of what Unity developers have been doing. And neither did the gamers by the way: they’ve downloaded tens of millions of copies of Unity-based games, more often than not without knowing or caring if tools or middleware had been used or not.

We never felt it right to shout out complaints, even if many of our friends and customers asked us to. We were after all in a precarious situation where Apple could have started banning Unity apps any day, and our responsibility for our thousands of customers weighed heavily on our shoulders. But it felt weird to speak in such a soft voice while under pressure, and we say sorry to those that felt we weren’t being proactive enough.

Now we couldn’t discuss publicly during the last months that Apple stayed in touch with us all along, and that we had conversations with them every few weeks. And after what we must assume has been deep deliberation and soul-seeking inside Apple, they finally came out with a response early this morning California time: they’ve simply decided to stop worrying about how applications are made.

We think this is exactly the right approach: it’s possible to make incredibly bad applications using just Xcode, and it’s possible to make just as amazingly excellent applications with a tool like Unity. The focus of a platform owner should obviously be on enabling its developers to do great work and so to give millions of users fun, thrilling, cute, enlightening and lovely experiences… wherever they may find themselves and whenever they want.

Apple has been in an accelerated learning process, and even though they’re some of the smartest people we know, figuring out how to operate the world’s most successful online marketplace can’t be easy. We have been frustrated with them along the way (and we have told them so, in a few more words), but we kept the channels open to work on a positive result. Today we respect them for coming to the right conclusion and in our eyes it’s best to let bygones be bygones!

So from all us in Unity Technologies to all of you: feel free to keep doing awesome work!

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

Roald Høyer-Hansen

Beast lightmapping – no doubt Never has lighting a scene been so much fun! Great interface and superb integration with Unity. It has actually changed the way I work, as I now do all my lightmapping/baking inside Unity, with Beast. I am sure 90% of the games we’ll see after 3.0 will look 10x as good as the ones we see today

Charles Hinshaw

There are BIG features, but I’m really enjoying the little scene view tweaks that improve daily use. Vertex snapping, look-at rotation, live previews for materials, dragging prefabs into the scene live with ray-snapping, interactive light gizmos, and rect selection — get used to them and then use a 2.x build and see how frustrating it gets. Unity 3 is going to allow for scenes to be constructed much more quickly and accurately.

Aras Pranckevicius

Personally, I’m quite happy with all the behind the scenes stuff that went into 3.0 rendering – surface shaders, seamless shader compilation into OpenGL ES shading language, the way we encode Deferred Lighting buffers etc. But I doubt anyone except me would ever notice them

Obscure features that are awesome: XOR operator support in JavaScript! XOR is cool because:

• It’s exclusive – very exclusive.
• No short circuiting semantics with this guy.
• It appreciates differences in people, or at least in operands, which is almost the same as people.
• It has an X in it. Everything that has an X in it is cool. And this one starts with an X.

Samantha Kalman

I’m most thrilled about the new audio features. Big things like fx filters and reverb zones to add atmosphere to your audio are awesome, but little things like reliable synching of multiple playing sources is completely wonderful. Combined with spectrum analysis you can do things like procedurally modify colors, meshes, lighting, or anything else based on audio playback. As someone who wants to make synaesthesia-invoking music games, I am so happy that these features made it into 3.0.

Nicolaj Schweitz

I love the new audio features, especially the possibility to use audio to affect any runtime variable. I can’t wait to see what people get out of this.

The mod tracker file support might start a new epoch in music for games — or should I say a revival of the demo scene trackers.

I am also amazed by the new physics features. Cloth is a powerful feature that along with DSP effects and reverb zones will expand the way our users will present their game worlds.

I am really happy that we have managed to include a lot of details into the mix, audio preview in the scene, object selector, audio rolloff curves, UI for the player settings — I could go on and on. It soothes my perfectionist heart to see that many minor improvements in Unity.

Rune Skovbo Johansen

A few things that are exciting to me, and haven’t been mentioned yet:

• New font back-end and text input with IME support should make Unity far more interesting to developers targeting Asia and other markets that have unique fonts.
• A few very typical basic math functions have been added that you’d need in many games, but which are not trivial for newbies to come up with on their own: MoveTowards (for floats and vectors) RotateTowards (for rotations and vectors), and a some others.
• Lots of small bug fixes all around that improve stability and performance.
• Full debugging capabilities

Joachim Ante

I think Unity has made the transition to being a robust level editing tool — developers can place modeled objects from inside Unity as opposed to artists creating the whole level in maya/max. You could always use Unity in that way in theory, but there were some drawbacks why people didn’t do it workflow wise and feature wise when they were doing a high end production.

There is a bunch of stuff that contributed to it, in order of importance:

1. Being able to lightmap from within Unity
2. Static batching
3. Being able to place things with the vertex snapping & raycast snapping
4. Occlusion culling so you can get performance out of big scenes
5. Being able to quickly find assets with the object picker
6. Being able to search stuff in a super awesome looking way

Equally important is the unified editor; we actually managed to get all platforms back under one tool again. This is awesome right now, but we also spent a lot of time making it easier to add new platforms, so that after 3.0 we can add new platforms at the speed of a rocket ship.

Warning: a technical post ahead with almost no pictures!

Over a year ago I had a thought that “Shaders must die” (part 1, part 2, part 3). And what do you know – turns out we’re doing this in Unity 3. We call this Surface Shaders cause I’ve a suspicion “shaders must die” as a feature name wouldn’t have flied very far.

Idea

The main idea is that 90% of the time I just want to declare surface properties. This is what I want to say:

Hey, albedo comes from this texture mixed with this texture, and normal comes from this normal map. Use Blinn-Phong lighting model please, and don’t bother me again!

With the above, I don’t have to care whether this will be used in a forward or deferred rendering, or how various light types will be handled, or how many lights per pass will be done in a forward renderer, or how some indirect illumination SH probes will come in, etc. I’m not interested in all that! These dirty bits are job of rendering programmers, just make it work dammit!

This is not a new idea. Most graphical shader editors that make sense do not have “pixel color” as the final output node; instead they have some node that basically describes surface parameters (diffuse, specularity, normal, …), and all the lighting code is usually not expressed in the shader graph itself. OpenShadingLanguage is a similar idea as well (but because it’s targeted at offline rendering for movies, it’s much richer & more complex).

Example

Here’s a simple – but full & complete – Unity 3.0 shader that does diffuse lighting with a texture & a normal map.

  Shader "Example/Diffuse Bump" {
    Properties {
      _MainTex ("Texture", 2D) = "white" {}
      _BumpMap ("Bumpmap", 2D) = "bump" {}
    }
    SubShader {
      Tags { "RenderType" = "Opaque" }
      CGPROGRAM
      #pragma surface surf Lambert
      struct Input {
        float2 uv_MainTex;
        float2 uv_BumpMap;
      };
      sampler2D _MainTex;
      sampler2D _BumpMap;
      void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o) {
        o.Albedo = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex).rgb;
        o.Normal = UnpackNormal (tex2D (_BumpMap, IN.uv_BumpMap));
      }
      ENDCG
    }
    Fallback "Diffuse"
  }

Given pretty model & textures, it can produce pretty pictures! How cool is that?

I grayed out bits that are not really interesting (declaration of serialized shader properties & their UI names, shader fallback for older machines etc.). What’s left is Cg/HLSL code, which is then augmented by tons of auto-generated code that deals with lighting & whatnot.

This surface shader dissected into pieces:

• #pragma surface surf Lambert: this is a surface shader with main function “surf”, and a Lambert lighting model. Lambert is one of predefined lighting models, but you can write your own.
• struct Input: input data for the surface shader. This can have various predefined inputs that will be computed per-vertex & passed into your surface function per-pixel. In this case, it’s two texture coordinates.
• surf function: actual surface shader code. It takes Input, and writes into SurfaceOutput (a predefined structure). It is possible to write into custom structures, provided you use lighting models that operate on those structures. The actual code just writes Albedo and Normal to the output.

What is generated

Unity’s “surface shader code generator” would take this, generate actual vertex & pixel shaders, and compile them to various target platforms. With default settings in Unity 3.0, it would make this shader support:

• Forward renderer and Deferred Lighting (Light Pre-Pass) renderer.
• Objects with precomputed lightmaps and without.
• Directional, Point and Spot lights; with projected light cookies or without; with shadowmaps or without. Well ok, this is only for forward renderer because in Deferred Lighting the lighting happens elsewhere.
• For Forward renderer, it would compile in support for lights computed per-vertex and spherical harmonics lights computed per-object. It would also generate extra additive blended pass if needed for the case when additional per-pixel lights have to be rendered in separate passes.
• For Deferred Lighting, it would generate base pass that outputs normals & specular power; and a final pass that combines albedo with lighting, adds in any lightmaps or emissive lighting etc.
• It can optionally generate a shadow caster rendering pass (needed if custom vertex position modifiers are used for vertex shader based animation; or some complex alpha-test effects are done).

For example, here’s code that would be compiled for a forward-rendered base pass with one directional light, 4 per-vertex point lights, 3rd order SH lights; optional lightmaps (I suggest just scrolling down):

#pragma vertex vert_surf
#pragma fragment frag_surf
#pragma fragmentoption ARB_fog_exp2
#pragma fragmentoption ARB_precision_hint_fastest
#pragma multi_compile_fwdbase
#include "HLSLSupport.cginc"
#include "UnityCG.cginc"
#include "Lighting.cginc"
#include "AutoLight.cginc"
struct Input {
	float2 uv_MainTex : TEXCOORD0;
};
sampler2D _MainTex;
sampler2D _BumpMap;
void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o)
{
	o.Albedo = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex).rgb;
	o.Normal = UnpackNormal (tex2D (_BumpMap, IN.uv_MainTex));
}
struct v2f_surf {
  V2F_POS_FOG;
  float2 hip_pack0 : TEXCOORD0;
  #ifndef LIGHTMAP_OFF
  float2 hip_lmap : TEXCOORD1;
  #else
  float3 lightDir : TEXCOORD1;
  float3 vlight : TEXCOORD2;
  #endif
  LIGHTING_COORDS(3,4)
};
#ifndef LIGHTMAP_OFF
float4 unity_LightmapST;
#endif
float4 _MainTex_ST;
v2f_surf vert_surf (appdata_full v) {
  v2f_surf o;
  PositionFog( v.vertex, o.pos, o.fog );
  o.hip_pack0.xy = TRANSFORM_TEX(v.texcoord, _MainTex);
  #ifndef LIGHTMAP_OFF
  o.hip_lmap.xy = v.texcoord1.xy * unity_LightmapST.xy + unity_LightmapST.zw;
  #endif
  float3 worldN = mul((float3x3)_Object2World, SCALED_NORMAL);
  TANGENT_SPACE_ROTATION;
  #ifdef LIGHTMAP_OFF
  o.lightDir = mul (rotation, ObjSpaceLightDir(v.vertex));
  #endif
  #ifdef LIGHTMAP_OFF
  float3 shlight = ShadeSH9 (float4(worldN,1.0));
  o.vlight = shlight;
  #ifdef VERTEXLIGHT_ON
  float3 worldPos = mul(_Object2World, v.vertex).xyz;
  o.vlight += Shade4PointLights (
    unity_4LightPosX0, unity_4LightPosY0, unity_4LightPosZ0,
    unity_LightColor0, unity_LightColor1, unity_LightColor2, unity_LightColor3,
    unity_4LightAtten0, worldPos, worldN );
  #endif // VERTEXLIGHT_ON
  #endif // LIGHTMAP_OFF
  TRANSFER_VERTEX_TO_FRAGMENT(o);
  return o;
}
#ifndef LIGHTMAP_OFF
sampler2D unity_Lightmap;
#endif
half4 frag_surf (v2f_surf IN) : COLOR {
  Input surfIN;
  surfIN.uv_MainTex = IN.hip_pack0.xy;
  SurfaceOutput o;
  o.Albedo = 0.0;
  o.Emission = 0.0;
  o.Specular = 0.0;
  o.Alpha = 0.0;
  o.Gloss = 0.0;
  surf (surfIN, o);
  half atten = LIGHT_ATTENUATION(IN);
  half4 c;
  #ifdef LIGHTMAP_OFF
  c = LightingLambert (o, IN.lightDir, atten);
  c.rgb += o.Albedo * IN.vlight;
  #else // LIGHTMAP_OFF
  half3 lmFull = DecodeLightmap (tex2D(unity_Lightmap, IN.hip_lmap.xy));
  #ifdef SHADOWS_SCREEN
  c.rgb = o.Albedo * min(lmFull, atten*2);
  #else
  c.rgb = o.Albedo * lmFull;
  #endif
  c.a = o.Alpha;
  #endif // LIGHTMAP_OFF
  return c;
}

Of those 90 lines of code, 10 are your original surface shader code; the remaining 80 would have to be pretty much written by hand in Unity 2.x days (well ok, less code would have to be written because 2.x had less rendering features). But wait, that was only base pass of the forward renderer! It also generates code for additive pass, for deferred base pass, deferred final pass, optionally for shadow caster pass and so on.

So this should be an easier to write lit shaders (it is for me at least). I hope this will also increase the number of Unity users who can write shaders at least 3 times (i.e. to 30 up from 10!). It should be more future proof to accomodate changes to the lighting pipeline we’ll do in Unity next.

Predefined Input values

The Input structure can contain texture coordinates and some predefined values, for example view direction, world space position, world space reflection vector and so on. Code to compute them is only generated if they are actually used. For example, if you use world space reflection to do some cubemap reflections (as emissive term) in your surface shader, then in Deferred Lighting base pass the reflection vector will not be computed (since it does not output emission, so by extension does not need reflection vector).

As a small example, the shader above extended to do simple rim lighting:

  #pragma surface surf Lambert
  struct Input {
      float2 uv_MainTex;
      float2 uv_BumpMap;
      float3 viewDir;
  };
  sampler2D _MainTex;
  sampler2D _BumpMap;
  float4 _RimColor;
  float _RimPower;
  void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o) {
      o.Albedo = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex).rgb;
      o.Normal = UnpackNormal (tex2D (_BumpMap, IN.uv_BumpMap));
      half rim =
          1.0 - saturate(dot (normalize(IN.viewDir), o.Normal));
      o.Emission = _RimColor.rgb * pow (rim, _RimPower);
  }

Vertex shader modifiers

It is possible to specify custom “vertex modifier” function that will be called at start of the generated vertex shader, to modify (or generate) per-vertex data. You know, vertex shader based tree wind animation, grass billboard extrusion and so on. It can also fill in any non-predefined values in the Input structure.

My favorite vertex modifier? Moving vertices along their normals.

Custom Lighting Models

There are a couple simple lighting models built-in, but it’s possible to specify your own. A lighting model is nothing more than a function that will be called with the filled SurfaceOutput structure and per-light parameters (direction, attenuation and so on). Different functions would have to be called in forward & deferred rendering cases; and naturally the deferred one has much less flexibility. So for any fancy effects, it is possible to say “do not compile this shader for deferred”, in which case it will be rendered via forward rendering.

Example of wrapped-Lambert lighting model:

  #pragma surface surf WrapLambert
  half4 LightingWrapLambert (SurfaceOutput s, half3 dir, half atten) {
      dir = normalize(dir);
      half NdotL = dot (s.Normal, dir);
      half diff = NdotL * 0.5 + 0.5;
      half4 c;
      c.rgb = s.Albedo * _LightColor0.rgb * (diff * atten * 2);
      c.a = s.Alpha;
      return c;
  }
  struct Input {
      float2 uv_MainTex;
  };
  sampler2D _MainTex;
  void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o) {
      o.Albedo = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex).rgb;
  }

Behind the scenes

We’re using HLSL parser from Ryan Gordon’s mojoshader to parse the original surface shader code and infer some things from the abstract syntax tree mojoshader produces. This way we can figure out what members are in what structures, go over function prototypes and so on. At this stage some error checking is done to tell the user his surface function is of wrong prototype, or his structures are missing required members – which is much better than failing with dozens of compile errors in the generated code later.

To figure out which surface shader inputs are actually used in the various lighting passes, we’re generating small dummy pixel shaders, compile them with Cg and use Cg’s API to query used inputs & outputs. This way we can figure out, for example, that a normal map nor it’s texture coordinate is not actually used in Deferred Lighting final pass, and save some vertex shader instructions & a texcoord interpolator.

The code that is ultimately generated is compiled with various shader compilers depending on the target platform (Cg for Windows/Mac, XDK HLSL for Xbox 360, PS3 Cg for PS3, and our own fork of HLSL2GLSL for iPhone, Android and upcoming NativeClient port of Unity).

So yeah, that’s it. We’ll see where this goes next, or what happens when Unity 3 will be released. I hope more folks will try to write shaders!

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!