Unity Technologies has announced the release of Unity Engine 2017.1. According to the team, this new version of the Unity Engine comes with impoved graphics quality and runtime performance. Moreover, Unity Engine 2017.1 introduces new ways artists & designers can create stunning cinematic content, compose artistic camera shots and tell better visual stories with the Timeline, Cinemachine and Post-processing tools.

As the press release reads, Unity exists to democratize development, solve hard problems and enable success — three core values that are the driving forces of Unity’s adoption by millions of creators. Unity powers more than 50% of all new mobile games and nearly 75% of all AR and VR content. Furthermore, interactive content made with Unity reaches nearly 3 billion devices worldwide.

Adam Myhill, Head of Cinematics at Unity, said:

“Unity 2017.1 is a one-stop creation powerhouse that will allow teams of artists and designers to unlock their full creativity. With incredibly open choreography tools like Timeline, smart procedural cameras in Cinemachine which follow your direction, and a built-in world-class colour grading suite plus the ability to edit and output all from within, we’re unleashing a content creation game changer that will improve collaboration across the board. Working in an environment with so much power and flexibility doesn’t just save a huge amount of time, it allows you to experiment, iterate and collaborate in ways which are the key ingredients of so many great things.”

Unity 2017.1 contains more than 100 new features and improvements devoted to increasing collaboration, improving runtime performance and graphics quality, and more.

Here are the key features of this new engine:

• Timeline: is a powerful new visual tool that allows you to create cinematic content such as cutscenes and trailers, gameplay sequences, and much more.
• Cinemachine: is an advanced camera system that enables you to compose your shots like a movie director from within Unity, without any code, and ushers in the era of procedural cinematography.
• Post-processing: lets you easily apply realistic filters to scenes using film industry terminology, controls, and colour space formats to create high quality visuals for more dramatic and realistic looks, so you can tell a better visual story.
• Unity Collaborate out of Beta, Free to use until October
• Live-Ops Analytics
• 2D improvements
• Animation improvements
• Ambisonic audio added
• Improved support for Visual Studio, including Mac OS
• Asset Bundle Browser
• Scripting Runtime upgrade | C#6 and .NET 4.6 added
• Model importer improvements
• NVIDIA VRWorks now up on Asset Store

You can download Unity 2017.1 from here. Regular users can download Unity Personal, while companies will have to purchase the Plus or the Pro version.

Here is hoping that with this new version of the Unity Engine, game developers will be able to achieve visuals comparable to the Adam tech demo!