Unity for Film — Annecy 2019
The future of filmmaking is real-time. Join the revolution!
Unity brings the creative freedom and efficiency of a real-time workflow to CG content creators developing short, episodic, and feature-length stories. Watch some of the incredible art styles brought to life by our community.
"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.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Unity is a dream. The flexibility in Unity enables savvy artists to realize ideas that would be logistically prohibitive in other engines.”
Learn how Unity can power your real-time animation projects
Unity for Look Development
Design any 2D or 3D look with our highly scriptable render pipeline and Shader Graph. Unlock real-time rendering for every other department, and enjoy increased efficiency throughout production. Make dynamic changes to assets that can propagate instantly at any point in production. Render 4K resolution in milliseconds.
Unity for Layout
Lay out your scene with richer context and all-in-one workflows. Increase productivity by 50% thanks to Unity’s Timeline and Cinemachine features. Enjoy smooth interoperability between DCC and Unity with FBX and Alembic. Blocking your characters and props with access to real-time lighting and look dev means you make informed creative decisions.
Unity for Lighting & Compositing
Make dynamic lighting changes throughout production and turn dailies into work sessions. Take advantage of state-of-art features like volumetric lighting, and increase quality with fast iteration cycles. Achieve fidelity of graphics in post processing that includes Ambient Occlusion and Anti-aliasing directly in Unity. Grade your colors in real-time to ensure picture-perfect pixels.
Animation
See how using real-time platforms as the creative center of your pipeline can dramatically improve your studio’s productivity and bring you closer to your creative vision.
Virtual Cinematography
Learn how Digital Monarch Media built virtual production and camera tools in Unity, which helped directors like Steven Spielberg and Denis Villeneuve make creative decisions in real-time.
Facial Mocap
Watch a demo showing how facial-performance capture using AR can save you days and even weeks of animation work.
Cinematic VR
See examples of what pioneers of immersive storytelling have created using Unity across a variety of platforms.
360 Video
Hear the creators behind Your Spiritual Temple Sucks talk about their innovative, immersive award-winning VR film experience and see clips from their work.
Power up with Python scripting
The Python scripting language is a de facto standard for workflow scripting in the CG ecosystem, and provides a single point of entry to data preparation, asset management, scene and sequence construction, user interface, and offline rendering.
Now users can leverage the power of their existing Python codebase with the Unity; we provide full Python scripting access (including PyQt/PySide) to the Unity Editor API. Mix the performance of C# with the wide reach of Python: call Python from C#, or C# from Python*.
*Python for Unity is available only in the Unity Editor.
Houdini integration for advanced tools
Houdini, developed by SideFX, is an Academy Award-winning 3D procedural software platform for the film, TV and video game industries. Best known for its capabilities in dynamics and simulations for visual effects, Houdini is increasingly being used by entertainment studios as a powerful procedural environment tool.
Having a seamless bridge between Unity and Houdini means a whole new way to create advanced simulations and visual effects. By using Houdini Engine for Unity, Houdini's digital assets can be run directly in the Unity Editor. Houdini's games tools assist in exporting Vertex Animation Textures to Unity. Unity’s new Visual FX graph (a GPU-accelerated particle system) allows you to load point cache simulations baked in Houdini to drive particle systems (see samples here and here).
The full potential of Maya unlocked
For the last several decades, modeling and animation artists have been using Autodesk Maya computer animation software. It has become the center of the animation and visual effects industry and pipeline.
Our partnership with Autodesk ensures that interoperability between Unity and Maya is best in class and helps studios take advantage of the full potential of their existing Maya-based workflows for asset creation and animation, in the real-time Unity platform.
Creative project management made easy with Shotgun
Shotgun Software, an Autodesk company, builds scalable, cloud-based software for review and production tracking and serves more than 1,600 creative companies worldwide. The Emmy Award-winning Shotgun platform provides essential business tools for managers and visual collaboration tools for artists and supervisors.
With Unity’s Shotgun Toolkit integration, artists can launch the Unity Editor directly from Shotgun, as well as load assets, animation and caches. Artists can also publish new Shotgun versions from inside the Unity Editor, using the same familiar Shotgun Toolkit UI. This kind of bridge enables project managers to integrate the full power of real-time into their existing pipeline.
Animation project template
Download this free Unity project file to learn how to set up your own multi-user episodic animation project in real-time. Get a full 3D environment with multiple characters, including our new fur shader, examples of how to structure your scenes, workflow tools, and full set-ups for lighting and post-processing in Unity.
Real-time Diaries: The Making of Sherman
Discover how Unity’s latest animated demo, “Sherman,” was made. Part 1 covers the creation, animation blocking, lookdev and camera layout for the short. Part 2 overviews the use of Alembic for the character animations, Visual FX Graph and details about the fur implementation!
Professional film training workshops
This onsite, hands-on workshop taught by our certified Master Trainers guarantees your team will get ramped up and comfortable using Unity quickly, with session content tailored to your studio’s needs.
Film project template
Download this film scene from Adam 2: The Mirror, and get started on creating your own linear clip with Unity. You’ll find examples of motion-captured characters, Cinemachine cameras and basic lighting and post-processing set up and ready for your story!
Real-time filmmaking, explained
One of the biggest differences in using a real-time workflow is that all departments are able to begin work immediately, simultaneously, and (most importantly) collaboratively.
Sundance Film Festival
Unity was a proud sponsor of the Sundance Film Festival 2019, in which 70% of the interactive pieces selected for the New Frontier exhibit were made with Unity!
Watch a demonstration
See our Senior Technical Product Manager for Film make a short film from scratch in under an hour!
Largest community of real-time creators
“Unity Developer” is #7 of the top 10 fastest growing jobs in the US, according to LinkedIn. With the talent pool centralized on Unity Connect, you can find skilled Unity talent to build your team and stay competitive. This is why students choose to learn Unity more than any other real-time platform.