Unity 2022 LTS for artists

UI Toolkit is a collection of features and tools to develop user interfaces and Editor extensions for greater efficiency.

Access better separation of concerns, more flexible layouts, and advanced stylings to create superior UI experiences. Generate default inspectors using UI Toolkit to simplify the use of Property Drawers.

Vector Drawing API has a 5x performance gain, gradients rendering, and the ability to build instructions outside the UI render loop. Find new support for background tiling, emojis in TextMeshPro, a newly verified Localization package, and over 200 bugs fixed.

Enrich your environments and high-fidelity worlds with High Definition Pipeline (HDRP).

Produce realistic skies with Cloud layers’s improved atmospheric lighting, and seamlessly blend between weather conditions with Volumetric Clouds. Create advanced procedural fog and volumetric effects such as ground fog effects, custom clouds, aurora borealis, sand storms, and smoke with Volumetric Materials in Shader Graph.

Add water surfaces like oceans, pools, and rivers with the new Water System, which gives you greater control over a physically based water lighting model, as well as simulation.

You can record photoreal frames for cinematics or beauty shots faster with the HDRP Path Tracer thanks to the new NVIDIA Optix™ and Intel® Open Image denoisers, as well as accessing improved visual fidelity with adaptive sampling when lighting a prop from an HDRI.

The Sprite Library Editor now provides a more efficient way to manage Sprite Libraries, with improved performance for larger sets of content. Sprite Atlas now works in the Editor, allowing users to experience the benefits of atlassing sprites without entering Play mode or making a build.

Blending Modes are now available in Shader Graph 2D master stacks in URP for Lit, Unlit, and Custom Lit, providing more options for creating unique visual effects.

Rigidbody2D and Collider2D now allow for per-object overrides to the Layer Collision Matrix, improving control over collision behavior in 2D physics simulations.

Aseprite Importer enables you to quickly bring in Aseprite’s .ase and .aseprite files into Unity, accelerating your 2D workflows for pixel art games.

Create and scale your graphics with a high degree of extensibility and customization using Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

Forward+ Rendering significantly increases the overall number of lights that can be used in rendering a frame. Rendering Layers allow you to filter and configure how different objects get rendered and are affected by various rendering options. You can add extra texture with Decal Layers to manage how different objects are affected by different Decal Projectors in a scene.

Experience improved graphics quality with Temporal Anti-aliasing (TAA), which reduces aliasing problems such as pixelated and flickering edges for optimized performance. Level Of Detail (LOD) cross-fade provides a smoother transition blending between the current mesh LOD and the next LOD based on the object’s distance from the camera.

Produce powerful, high-fidelity, richly detailed visual effects with VFX Graph.

Create and render reusable smoke, dust, and explosion effects with new levels of visual fidelity using 6-Way lighting, a complete end-to-end workflow (from DCC to Unity) to bake and render lightmaps so you can relight the same effect in different conditions.

Our new VFX Graph Timeline integration drastically improves complex VFX authoring workflows. It allows you to use Timeline to precisely place and edit VFX events, sequence multiple effects, synchronize FX with animations, and scrub back and forth frame by frame on the timeline for fine-grained control.

You can now dynamically enable and disable blocks in graphs using a Boolean Port for greater flexibility and performance when creating configurable uber effects. Effect Instancing allows you to reuse the same VFX assets multiple times with lower CPU overhead.

Manage complex material libraries with Material Variants, which enable you to reuse and refine your management of materials that share most but not all surface properties.

Create Custom Post Process, Custom Passes, and Custom textures using Shader Graph with the new full screen master node, available for both HDRP and URP.

Finally, significant improvements have been made to Shader Variant Prefiltering, reducing shader build times and runtime memory usage for projects created with Unity’s Scriptable Render Pipelines.