Unity Technologies has sponsored this post.

The Unity Pro editor. (Image courtesy of The Manufacturing Technology Centre.)

In part one of our introduction to the Unity Industrial Collection, we covered importing and optimizing 3D data with the Pixyz Plugin and Unity Pro editor.

In part two, we’ll examine application development using the Unity Industrial Collection, and how to build and deploy apps to a variety of platforms, including augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR).

Developing Unity Applications

What kind of applications can be made with Unity? Unity and other game engines are built with versatility in mind, and that is why the real-time 3D platform has found such ready applications in industry. Unity is used for design visualization, machine learning, digital twin creation, spatial optimization, training simulators, factory planning, industrial robotics and quality assurance, to name a few industrial use cases. There are also turnkey solutions built on top of Unity, such as Unity Forma, a tool for quickly creating product configurators and other marketing applications.

Unity Forma, built on top of the Unity Industrial Collection, was used to develop this headphones configurator. (Image courtesy of Unity.)

The Unity Industrial Collection provides native features for all of these use cases, starting with an extensible import pipeline for 3D data (see Part 1 for more details). The Unity Pro editor allows developers to fine tune the look of their scene with an extensible rendering pipeline, including the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) for high-end graphics hardware with ray tracing support.

The Unity Pro editor also provides tools to create animations, manipulate lighting and shading, add VFX, incorporate interactivity through C# or visual scripting, and include audio and video assets. Users can learn these features step by step with Unity’s broad set of guided tutorials.

And for any feature that isn’t natively included in the Unity Industrial Collection, there is a way to add it in.

Extending the Unity Industrial Collection

The Unity Pro editor is the main hub of Unity development, but it does not exist in a vacuum. There are many ways to augment the real-time 3D platform. We spoke extensively about one such augmentation, the Pixyz Plugin, in our previous instalment. The Pixyz Plugin is a powerful addition to the Unity Pro editor that allows 3D data to be natively imported from professional software such as CATIA and Revit, and optimized directly in Unity. It has proven so popular and useful among Unity users that Unity acquired its developer earlier this year.

The success of Pixyz exemplifies one of the most powerful features of the Unity Industrial Collection: its extensibility. The platform is designed to be customized, with users encouraged to write their own scripts and develop their own features.

“Unity is not a finite tool. It is fully extensible,” emphasized Jerome Maurey-Delaunay, senior technical specialist for industrial applications at Unity. “This whole tool that Pixyz developed—they didn't have special access to Unity when they released this product. This is all what the community can do with Unity. They can extend the editor, they can associate their plugins with file types and make sure that these plugins are embodied with their workflows.”

The Unity Asset Store

Users who lack the experience or time to develop custom tools may be better served by the Unity Asset Store, an extensive library of free and paid Unity assets created by the user community. For example, as a 3D mouse user, I wanted to find a way to use my 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator in the Unity Pro editor, a feature which is not natively supported. I quickly discovered the free SpaceNavigator Driver on the Unity asset store, and was up and spacenavigating a few clicks later.

Screenshot of the Unity Asset Store with a selection of assets for Automotive & Manufacturing.

Not all tools from the Unity Asset Store are so basic. The store is home to full-fledged applications such as Prespective, a plugin for developing digital twins in Unity, as well as countless tools for customizing the user interface and adding rich functionality to Unity applications. The Unity Asset Store also includes a smorgasbord of 3D and 2D models, textures and materials, application templates, audio tracks, visual effects and more.

Unity itself has developed several free assets on the store, including VFX packs, templates and tutorials. The company also acquired a visual scripting engine called Bolt, available on the Asset Store for previous versions of Unity but now included by default with the 2021 version and beyond. For those who prefer noding to coding, Bolt provides a way to develop Unity applications without writing any C#.

The Bolt visual scripting editor. (Image courtesy of Unity.)

Build and Deploy in Unity

Unity provides an extensible build pipeline that users can configure for their projects. For industrial customers who may be churning out thousands of parts and changes per day, that extensibility is necessary for a productive workflow. “You can build assets, you can build executables, you can build executables that have assets in them. It really depends on your scenarios,” Maurey-Delaunay explained.

He continued, “The same way we have a fully customizable extensible render pipeline, or a fully customizable extensible import pipeline, we have an extensible build pipeline. You can control a lot of the parameters the same way as with the Pixyz rules. But normally people would write custom C# script, which will trigger builds.”

Unity can deploy apps to a variety of XR headsets. (Image courtesy of Unity.)

One of the advantages of developing on a real-time 3D platform like Unity is that it is easy to deploy applications to a wide variety of platforms, from mobile (iOS, Android) to web (WebGL) to desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) to extended reality. XR, which comprises augmented and virtual reality (among other variants), has proven to be one of the most compelling platforms for industrial real-time 3D development. Unity apps can be deployed to Oculus, HoloLens, Varjo and any other headsets supported by the OpenXR API. According to the company, 90 percent of head-worn AR experiences are powered by Unity.

In total, Unity officially supports 20 different deployment platforms.

Unity offers a product called Unity Build Server which provides command line access to Unity for running batch mode builds on network hardware, saving local workstation resources and allowing Unity projects to scale much more efficiently.

“In one go, you can build for iOS, then you can switch the project to Android, then you can switch to Windows. You don't have to have multiple instances building for a specific platform. You can do that consecutively on the server,” Maurey-Delaunay noted.

Another deployment option is through a Unity product called Furioos, which streams 3D applications (including but not limited to Unity apps) to any device with a web browser. Furioos provides real-time 3D interactivity in full HD without requiring powerful client hardware.

Furioos enables high quality 3D streaming on any device with a web browser. (Image courtesy of Furioos.)

Conclusion to the Unity Industrial Collection

Above: A video from Unity with an overview of features for product design and development.

In this two-part introduction to the Unity Industrial Collection, we have taken a bird’s-eye-tour of how the platform can be used to develop all manner of industrial applications. Users begin by importing their 3D data, which thanks to the Pixyz Plugin can be native CAD, BIM or point cloud files from dozens of popular applications. Pixyz can be further used to optimize that data for Unity applications and the user’s target hardware.

Next, Unity users can create their applications using Unity’s built-in development tools, adjusting the look of their data and their scene, incorporating interactivity with C# scripting, and adding audio and video effects. Any functionality missing in the core platform can be added in through custom plugins or by leveraging community assets from the Unity Asset Store.

As users develop their applications, which can range from a relatively simple lightweight CAD viewer to something as complex as a full factory training simulator, they can make use of Unity’s extensible build pipeline to test and deploy their apps to any of 20 different platforms.

In this way, real-time 3D platforms like the Unity Industrial Collection have proven their mettle to professional designers, engineers, architects and manufacturers. Their strength lies in their versatility, enabling these users to quickly create novel applications bespoke for their workflows.

To learn more about the Unity Industrial Collection, visit Unity.com.