A major release brings to Unity a handful of workflow enhancements and technical improvements.
Unity released Unity 2020.2 TECH Stream. The release will upgrade Unity users’ experience by bringing over 400 improvements and enhancements aimed to speed up the processes, increase productivity as well as solve technical issues and to ensure to move towards 2020 LTS.
“While we’re always making an effort to deliver on the needs of Unity’s users, this year, we put a particular focus on listening to specific requests from our community. We want to make sure that our tools are delivering the best possible experience and enabling the right results.”
Brett Bibby, Chief Product Officer at Unity via press release
Quality of Life Improvements:
- Arrays and Lists can be reordered in the Inspector. Developers can use the attribute [NonReorderable] to disable this function.
- Texture Import Pipeline improved by adding an option of importing the flipbook array/3D textures to preview them directly without writing custom C# code.
- Mesh Inspecto allows to visualize blend shapes in the Mesh inspector when present and drag multiple Prefabs into the Scene simultaneously.
- Quick Search through all the Scenes and Prefabs of the project at once with the updated Quick Search package.
Programmer Tools & Performance Improvements:
- Unity Safe Mode where users can work on the project solve compilation errors, and bring the project environment back into a working state safely.
- Deterministic Compilation for writing C# scripts will optimize compilation times by avoiding unnecessary recompiling of assembly definition references, creating a more efficient conversion process.
- PhysX comes with improvements of linking RigidBody hierarchies to ArticulationBody hierarchies that have regular joints with PhysX.
- Performance and Stability Improvements include speedier searches in the Editor scripted importers registration function, which are up to 800 times faster, and improved Nested Prefabs, which work up to 250 times faster.
- The Profiler includes more visualization options, allowing users to read and display statistics in Players with the API.
- Support for C# 8 features and enhancements
CG-Tools:
- HDRP updated with tools for debug lighting and improvements to the decal system. The pipeline comes with new path-tracing elements and subsurface scattering, as well as modifications and new features for Ray tracing (in Preview).
- New HDRP Sample Template provides a great starting point for exploring, learning, and creating realistic scenes with different light intensities. Download it from the Unity Hub.
- The updated URP brings new features that come closer to parity with Unity’s built-in renderer. SSAO improves the quality of ambient lighting. The pipeline also includes a new Lit Shader with additional surface inputs.
- Shader Graph now has several new features that improve workflow for technical artists, including smoother Graph Editor performance.
- 2D Animation got integrated 2D Inverse Kinematics (IK) that gives animators an opportunity to use 2D skeletal animation to expand animation possibilities and save time.
- The release also has updates to the Shader Graph, VFX Graph, and Animation Rigging Package - now out of Preview. Global Illumination and Recorder API also help creators bring more quality to their projects.
Read more information about the release in the blog post on the Unity website. Don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, latest news, awesome artworks, and more.