The opening keynote of Unite Europe 2017 brought some great news for Unity users.
The opening keynote of Unite Europe 2017 brought some great news for Unity users. First of all, Unity 2017.1 will be released in July. The team also introduced Timeline, Cinemachine and other features of the upcoming version.
You can watch the full recorded keynote below:
Timeline
Timeline is Unity’s new powerful visual tool that is said to allow artists and designers to create cinematic content (like the award-winning Adam short film), cutscenes, gameplay sequences, and much more. Timeline’s multi-track sequencing will allows artists and designers to create without any coding by simply orchestrating game objects, animations, sounds, and scenes.
Cinemachine smart camera system
Cinemachine, the result of over a decade of building gameplay and cinematic cameras, is the tool that can let you eliminate countless hours of hand animation, camera programming, and revision by using the suite of smart cameras to compose a shot whether in gameplay or for cinematic sequences.
Cameras can, for example, dynamically follow a character, adapt to outside changes, and select the best shots to optimize scene composition.You can also tune all of the camera settings while in play-mode, enabling super fast iteration times.
Unity 2017.1
Unity 2017.1 will bring a great deal of improvements across the board: graphics (progressive lightmapper, particle system, deferred rendering on iOS/Metal), scripting (.NET4.6/C#6 experimental), team collaboration (Collaborate), Editor productivity (FBX import, Animation keyframing workflow), 2D (Sprite Atlas), VR platforms (VR Works), Video Player (PS4), Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Live-ops Analytics (Remote Settings, Standard Events), and more.
Unity 2017.1 will be released in July, but you can already try the release candidate version.