Download free Unity ebooks for technical and VFX artists
Originally posted on 19 October 2022 and updated with details of the VFX ebook.
Unity has released two new free ebooks aimed at artists using more advanced features in Unity 2021 LTS, the latest Long Term Support Release of the game engine.
Unity for Technical Artists: Key Toolsets and Workflows provides a 92-page overview of the key features of the game engine for artists using it in production.
The Definitive Guide to Creating Advanced Visual Effects in Unity is a 119-page guide to using Unity to create visual effects for games.
Unity for Technical Artists: Key Toolsets and Workflows
As the name suggests, Unity for Technical Artists: Key Toolsets and Workflows summarises Unity’s main artist toolsets: primarily for developing 3D games, although there is a chapter on 2D game development.
Topics covered include world building, including Unity’s ProBuilder and Polybrush tools, shading, lighting – both real-time GI and using baked lightmaps – animation, visual effects, and editing cutscenes.
There is also a full chapter devloted to Unity’s main current render pipelines: the Universal Render Pipeline for mobile titles and the High Definition Render Pipeline for console and desktop games.
Shorter sections cover scripting, and performance debugging Unity projects.
While the ebook itself only provides summaries of the toolsets, it includes links to more detailed resources, including blog posts, online documentation, and other downloadable PDFs.
There is also an appendix on creating digital humans in Unity, which summarises the workflow Unity itself used on recent tech demos like The Heretic and Enemies.
The Definitive Guide to Creating Advanced Visual Effects in Unity
The Definitive Guide to Creating Advanced Visual Effects in Unity provides a detailed overview of the key features in the VFX Graph, Unity’s real-time particle effects system.
While it isn’t a step-by-step guide to creating your own effects, it does explain how the effects in Unity’s Visual Effects Graph – Samples pack – also a free download – were constructed.
The e-book also explores how to trigger effects during gameplay, how Point Caches, Signed Distance Fields and Vector Fields can be used to enhance VFX, and the bonus tools in Unity’s free VFXToolbox package.
Free to download without registration
Unity for Technical Artists: Key Toolsets and Workflows and The Definitive Guide to Creating Advanced Visual Effects in Unity are free. You don’t need to register on Unity’s website to download them.
The current editions cover Unity 2021 LTS, the latest Long Term Support release.
Download free ebook Unity for Technical Artists: Key Toolsets and Workflows
Download free ebook The Definitive Guide to Creating Advanced Visual Effects in Unity