Unity spotlights lighting workflows amongst 400 improvements in 2020.2 release today

Unity has just released the latest version of its engine for end users: 2020.2. Today’s update promises wide-ranging improvements to workflows and productivity with over 400 improvements and enhancements.

Tech Stream releases provide Unity users with the latest features, introducing them before they are then cascaded down to the LTS (long-term support) releases, for those wanting greater stability over long projects.

“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,” said Brett Bibby, Chief Product Officer, Unity.

“Thanks to the incredible insights we’ve received from our users, we’ve been able to deliver improved solutions and better workflows in Unity 2020.2 TECH Stream that have made it more stable and more robust than ever before.”

Literally the most visible improvements have come for artists, with new tools to debug lighting in the High Definition Render Pipeline, with path-tracing elements and subsurface scattering, plus new feature for ray-tracing (still in preview). There’s also a n ew sample template for artists to explore creating realistic scenes.

Elsewhere there are quality of life improvements to arrays and lists, which are now reorderable in the inspector, to the texture import pipeline and the mesh inspector. While programmer tools include a new safe mode. To help manage issues at startup of a project, deterministic compilation to improve times by removing unnecessary repetition, and improved linking of RigidBody hierarchies with PhysX.

We recently interviewed Unity CPO Brett Bibby about how the engine worked for years to prepare for the next-gen console launch.