Unity 2019.1 | Official Release

Unity 2019.1 has officially launched. In addition to all the innovations in the beta version of the engine, the Lightweight Pipeline Rendering (LWRP), first introduced in Unity 2018.1, is officially out of preview and will gain dynamic scaling on mobile devices with high-resolution displays.

Its counterpart, High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), remains in preview mode, but it has the ability to customize project parameters, a new debug mode, and a number of improvements to the workflow.

Post-processing effects, previously available in the Post-Processing Stack, were also integrated directly into HDRP, although this breaks compatibility with the current version of the stack.

BasicScriptable Render Pipeline (SRP) now supports AxF for measured materials used in a number of other DCC applications, and a new hair node based on the Kajiya-Kay lighting model.

Significant changes have affected the lighting in general. Exposure is now calculated during rendering, rather than as a post effect, making possible much higher light intensity values. Reflections can now be baked on the GPU, and planar reflections in real time are also supported.

For rendering, Unity now supports the standard Nvidia-based OptiX denoiser, as well as multiple importance sampling, reducing sampling to the required amount to create a noiseless image.

Other graphics-related changes include the ability to "warm up" the simulation in a new Visual Effect Graph, which allows users to create simulations that more accurately meet their requirements.

There are also improvements in Timeline, the Unity cinematic editing toolkit. In addition, Sprite Shape and 2D animation toolsets and support for H.265 video coding have been improved.

Separate previews of hardware-accelerated RTX ray tracing and USD support

Unity Technologies announced that they released a preview of the RTX system with hardware acceleration only for Windows, which was announced on GDC 2019, which should appear only in Unity 2019.3.

The source code is available on GitHub, and the compiled binaries can be downloaded here.

The developer released a preview package in March with support for USD, the universal scene description format used by Pixar for exchanging complex VFX scene data between applications.