What’s New in Unity 2022?

What’s new in 2022 LTS for Artists?

Although the technical improvements for programmers unlock more productivity and performance, there are also many graphical improvements in Unity 2022 LTS. After all, if you have more performance budget, why not fill it with shinier graphics?

HDR Improvements

And the shiniest of graphics come from Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline, or HDRP. HDRP has had a host of added features in this new version of Unity.

Volumetric Materials

The biggest wow factor from the demos comes from the new Volumetric Materials. These materials allow you to build realistic and procedural fog and volumetric effects such as ground fog, custom clouds, sand storms and smoke using the Shader Graph.

Upgrading Cloud Layers

Cloud layers are not new, but in 2022 they have had some upgrades. When combined with the physically based sky, sunlight color now has a much more significant effect on the clouds’ appearance. Volumetric cloud blending also allows you to blend seamlessly between different weather conditions.

Improving Water System

A personal favorite is the new Water system. Unity’s water effects were always good, but this new system blows everything else out of the water!

With this system, you can create seas, lakes and rivers with beautiful refractions, reflections and underwater effects. Combine with the above cloud effects, and you can make a very moody scene at sea. A new Assassins Creed Black Flag game, anyone?

Full-Screen Shader Graph

A new master node is added to Shader Graph for a full-screen effect. This allows you to add custom passes, textures or post processes to the entire game view. There are several examples available in the HDRP sample content, including:

• Custom Pass: Edge Detection, Sobel Filter, Object Highlight, Night Vision, Speed Lines
• Custom Render Targets: Dynamic Custom HDRi for Night Sky, Animated Water Droplets
• Custom Post Process: Colorblindness Filter

URP Improvements

Of course, not everyone’s making large-budget games! The Universal Render Pipeline (URP) supports a much wider range of platforms with a lower rendering budget. Unity 2022 LTS brings plenty of improvements to this pipeline also.

Smoothing Transitions with LOD Cross-Fade

Everyone has played those games where you see some trees or houses in the background pop into a much more detailed asset as you approach them. LOD, or Levels of Detail, is a common rendering technique to save performance budget when rendering objects in the distance by replacing their model or textures with a lower detailed version. This “pop in” effect happens when the model moves from one LOD to the next.

Unity 2022 introduces a LOD Cross-Fade mechanic, which blends different LODs as they change. The result is a much smoother transition that’s barely noticeable to the player.

Rendering with Forward+

One of the main drawbacks of working in URP with Forward Rendering is a limit on how many dynamic lights you can use in a scene. Unity 2022 introduces Forward+, which culls lights spatially rather than per object. The result is a significant performance increase, enabling you to use many more lights than with the standard Forward renderer.

Sampling with TAA

Temporal Anti-aliasing (TAA) reduces aliasing problems such as pixelated or “jaggy” edges. In TAA, each pixel is sampled once per frame, but the sample is at a different location within the pixel. Pixels sampled in past frames are then blended with pixels sampled in the current frame to produce a final anti-aliased image.

Unity already has both Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) and Fast Approximation Anti-Aliasing (FXAA). Because TAA samples only once, it is, in theory, faster than MSAA. FXAA doesn’t sample previous frames, so although it’s faster than TAA, it provides a lower-quality result than TAA. You’ll need to experiment to determine which is best for your project.

Adding Decal Layers

Decals are a great way to add extra flavor to your scenes. Decals are projected onto meshes to break up repetitive materials and patterns. Previously, this projection applied to all meshes in a scene, which might have included a player character. Decal layers allow you to select meshes that ignore the decal projection.

Adding Material Variants

Material Variants (also available in HDRP) are a welcome addition. Just as Prefab variants added great workflow optimizations, Material Variants aim to do the same. You can create templates and, from there, create variants that share the same base properties. Changing one of those properties in the base material will propagate through all the variants. So long as that property wasn’t overridden in the child material, it’s an Object-Oriented approach to materials that should be very useful!

Where to Go From Here?

Unity 2022 LTS brings a host of exciting new features and improvements. Take a look at the showreel to see many of the features discussed here:

If you want to know what’s on the Unity 2023 Roadmap, you can see all the different categories and even leave your feedback over here.

And, of course, look out for more Unity tutorials coming soon right here!