Unity Technologies has unveiled its 2025 roadmap for Unity, its game engine and real-time renderer, during a session at this week’s Game Developers Conference.
Unity 6.1, due out next month, gets improvements to rendering, including a new Deferred+ rendering path in the Universal Render Pipeline, and support for Variable Rate Shading.
Subsequent Unity 6.x releases will feature a new automated Mesh LOD system, an experimental new animation system, and updates to the physics system and UI Toolkit.
Future releases – presumably those in the Unity 7 series – will introduce new generative AI features for generating textured 3D meshes and skyboxes.
Unity 6.1: improvements to shading and rendering
Unity 6.1, currently in beta, and due for a stable release in April 2025 is primarily a performance- and stability-focused update, although there are a few new features.
Those most relevant to artists include a new Deferred+ rendering path in the Universal Render Pipeline, support for Variable Rate Shading, and better DirectX 12 ray tracing performance.
You can find more details in our separate story on Unity 6.1.
Unity 6.x: New automated Mesh LOD system
Features due later in the Unity 6.x series include a new Mesh LOD system.
Unity describes it as providing “compact automated LOD generation in-editor”, making it possible to generate levels of detail for both static and skinned meshes directly inside the Unity Editor, rather than having to configure LOD levels in an external 3D modeling app.
Unity 6.x: Preview of new animation system
Unity’s new animation system will also be available as an official preview later during the Unity 6.x release cycle.
Changes include support for procedural rigging for any skeletal asset, not just characters; and for remapping animations across assets with differing size, proportions and hierarchies.
The slide above also namechecks a new animation blending system, with support for per-bone masking and layer blending, and pose correction via a new underlying rig graph.
The new animation system will also feature a reworked hierarchical, layered State Machine capable of scaling to “thousands” of characters.
At 32:27 in the video, you can see a demo of a crowd animation with 1,000 characters running in-editor at 30fps, although Unity didn’t say what hardware configuration it was running on.
Unity 6.x: swappable physics backends, and updates to native Unity physics
Changes to the physics system include a swappable physics backend, making it possible to switch between physics engines in project settings.
The slide above mentions “initial support” for Havok Physics and PhysX, but Bullet Physics and MuJoCo were also namechecked in the presentation.
The native Unity Physics system will get new solvers for “more complex and reliable” behaviors.
Unity 6.x: Updates to the UI Toolkit
Interface designers get updates to Unity’s UI Toolkit.
Key changes include the option to render the UI directly in world space, for more immersive XR experiences, and to apply post effects like blur or color shifts.
Support for vector graphics will reduce asset file sizes, and enable assets to scale across device screen sizes without loss of visual quality.
It will also be possible to modify the ubershader without recreating it, allowing for “detailed adjustments to text, graphics and textures through familiar Shader Graph workflows”.
Unity 6.x and beyond: new generative AI tools
Unity also announced updates to Unity Muse, its in-editor generative AI toolset.
Changes include support for video-to-motion as well as text-to-motion for animation, making it possible to generate “nuanced animations” from smartphone reference footage.
There will also be a new library of LoRAs for generating sprites, pre-trained for use cases like icons, props and platformer backgrounds.
3D mesh and texture generation and skybox generation are further off: presumably in the Unity 7.x release cycle.
New collaboration and programming features
Other changes covered in the video include new live collaboration features, making it possible to edit files locally and have revisions synced automatically to the cloud.
Programmers get improvements to the Entity Component System, the Unity Profiler, and new live game development features, covered in detail in the final section of the video.
No mention of the new world-building tools, unified renderer, or Shader Graph 2
However, several key upcoming features that Unity had previously announced were not mentioned during the GDC presentation, and will presumably not arrive in 2025.
They include updates to the world-building tools, the new unified renderer and Shader Graph 2, all previewed at Unite 2024 last year. You can find more details in this story.
Release dates for the Unity 6.x release cycle
Unity 6.1 is due for a stable release in April 2025. Unity hasn’t confirmed dates for the other Unity 6.x releases, or which of the features previewed at GDC 2025 will be in which release.
Read Unity’s overview of its 2025 roadmap on its blog
Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.
