Unity for Film — Annecy 2019
Create. Iterate. Collaborate. In real time.
Unity brings real-time workflows to animation content creators – speeding up traditional pipelines and giving artists, producers, and directors more opportunities for creative freedom, fast feedback, and artistic iteration on a flexible platform. With Unity, real-time production is a reality.
Real timesavers for every artist in the studio
Integrate with your DCCs of choice
Exchange models, animations, cameras, lighting, and FX between Unity and most digital content creation tools. With Alembic, USD, and FBX workflows, you can work in real-time with the same formats as your asset pipeline and use the right file for any job.
Render beautiful visuals
Cinematic shots are in reach, even in real time. Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) puts professional lookdev and VFX tools in your artists’ hands, like physically based rendering, real-time ray tracing, visual shader creation, and next-level effects simulations.
Animate and edit with familiar toolsets
Control, experiment, and perfect how lights, cameras, and action come together in a scene. By orchestrating timing, angles, movements, and cues in real-time with the flexibility of Unity’s editing and sequencing tools, artists can bring their creations to life without coding.
Record final frames as fast as you watch them
You don’t have to wait for a render farm to deliver high-resolution video clips, validate image sequences, and easily generate multiple versions of your content. Get dailies out faster, shorten review cycles, or export for compositing, all with Unity’s lightning-fast recording tools.
“Working in Unity’s real-time engine allowed me to give feedback and visually see changes on the spot. This frees up time to focus on story or other aspects of production.”
“Production-wise, we dramatically reduced render time, which is now practically real-time. Unity also allowed us to streamline our workflow, reducing iterations and resources.”
“We can create lots of content quickly while retaining high quality owing to reduced render times and a shortened feedback cycle – we can show clients changes in real-time.”
“We learned as we went and at first it took a few weeks to get the environment to the quality we needed. Now we can create a full 11-minute episode every week!”
"I love the fact that I can touch every facet of audiovisual storytelling in one place, at the same time. The simplest way to describe working in Unity is pure creation.”?
“Unity’s greatest asset is giving creators the flexibility to explore ideas and visuals in the blink of an eye. It opens up a world where exploration and play result in a better product.”
“Unity is a dream. The flexibility in Unity enables savvy artists to realize ideas that would be logistically prohibitive in other engines.”
Sherman animation project
Download this fully-loaded Unity project file to your high-end graphics-capable workstation, and learn how to set up your own multi-user episodic animation project in real-time. Get a sophisticated 3D environment with multiple characters (including one using our new fur shader), examples of how to structure your scenes, workflow tools, and full set-ups for lighting and post-processing in Unity.
Film project template
Download a film scene from Adam 2: The Mirror, and get started on creating your own film clip with Unity. In this lightweight project, you’ll find examples of motion-captured characters, Cinemachine cameras, and basic lighting and post-processing, set up and ready for your story.
The making of a scene
Get the low-down on how the Sherman animated Unity demo was made. Part 1 covers the short’s creation, animation blocking, lookdev, and camera layout. Part 2 explores using Alembic for character animations, Visual FX Graph, and the fur implementation. Part 3 teaches you everything you need to know to get started with real-time cinematic lighting.
