Yesterday, the Unity team announced the release of Unity 2019.2. In this release, they have added more than 170 new features and enhancements for artists, designers, and programmers. They have updated ProBuilder, Shader Graph, 2D Animation, Burst Compiler, UI Elements, and many more.
Major highlights for Unity 2019.2
ProBuilder 4.0 ships as verified with 2019.2. It is a unique hybrid of 3D modeling and level design tools, optimized for building simple geometry but capable of detailed editing and UV unwrapping as needed.
Polybrush is now available via Package Manager as a Preview package. This versatile tool lets you sculpt complex shapes from any 3D model, position detail meshes, paint in custom lighting or coloring, and blend textures across meshes directly in the Editor.
DSPGraph is the new audio rendering/mixing system, built on top of Unity’s C# Job System. It’s now available as a Preview package.
They have improved on UI Elements, Unity’s new UI framework, which renders UI for graph-based tools such as Shader Graph, Visual Effect Graph, and Visual Scripting.
To help you better organize your complex graphs, Unity has added subgraphs to Visual Effect Graph. You can share, combine, and reuse subgraphs for blocks and operators, and also embed complete VFX within VFX. There is an improvement in the integration between Visual Effect Graph and the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), which pulls VFX Graph in by default, providing you with additional rendering features.
With Shader Graph you can now use Color Modes to highlight nodes on your graph with colors based on various features or select your own colors to improve readability. This is especially useful in large graphs.
The team has added swappable Sprites functionality to the 2D Animation tool. With this new feature, you can change a GameObject’s rendered Sprites while reusing the same skeleton rig and animation clips. This lets you quickly create multiple characters using different Sprite Libraries or customize parts of them with Sprite Resolvers.
With this release Burst Compiler 1.1 includes several improvements to JIT compilation time and some C# improvements. Additionally, the Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider integrations are available as packages.
Mobile developers will benefit from improved OpenGL support, as the team has added OpenGL multithreading support (iOS) to improve performance on low-end iOS devices that don’t support Metal.
As with all releases, 2019.2 includes a large number of improvements and bug fixes. You can find the full list of features, improvements, and fixes in Unity 2019.2 Release Notes.
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