The job seeker's journey with Unity

What is Unity?

What can Unity do?

The real-time production cycle

Roles and careers for real-time creators

How our established creators learned Unity

Develop your learning plan

Next steps on your journey

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the Unity engine: why it’s sometimes referred to as a game engine, how it came to be, and how it has evolved over the years.

Overview

What is a game engine?

What do you do in a game engine?

What don’t you do in a game engine?

The Unity Story

Next steps

In this tutorial, you will learn about career and job opportunities in real-time production, ranging from entry- to director-level positions. You will learn about the disciplines of Art and Design as well as Programming. You will see what a typical workday looks like for someone in each of these fields. You will also learn what it looks like to work as a Unity generalist, never specializing exclusively in one particular discipline. 

Careers in Art and Design

Careers in Programming

Careers as a generalist

What will be your path?

Summary

By now, you might have some thoughts on potential projects or careers that would put your Unity skills to good use. You’re embarking on a journey of learning Unity, and along the way you want to challenge yourself — but not take on too much. In this tutorial, our established creators will talk about their early projects, the challenges they overcame, and the career paths they followed.  

Be realistic

Be patient

Stick with it

Join the communities

Explore game jams

In this tutorial, you will learn more about setting goals for learning Unity, To help you reach your goals, we invite you to create a learning action plan.

Inspiration for identifying your goal

Identify your goal

Complete your plan

Share your Plan 

Interested in learning more about jobs in real-time 3D? New to Unity, and wondering how to start a serious course of learning? Then you're in the right place.

In this course, you'll learn how to learn Unity the way professionals do. You'll also find out about some real-time 3D industry practices, roles, and responsibilities. Along the way, you'll hear from real-time 3D creators who have been at the beginning of their journey, just like you are — and have become professionals.

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Job seeker's guide to learning Unity

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What is "real-time"?

What industries use Unity?

Experience Unity in action

Understand Unity’s history and role in industries that rely on real-time creation.

Real-time Industry Essentials

NealEdu

Product Manager at Unity

See how real-time 3D is driving innovation across industries | Unity

Made With Unity games sizzle reel - Spring 2024 | Unity

Enemies – real-time cinematic teaser | Unity

Create immersive experiences for real-world applications at scale | Unity

How real-time 3D is transforming global industries

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the different types of content that can be created with the Unity Engine. By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to:

Describe how real-time creation software is used in different industries. 

Identify a variety of real-time creators by their usage of Unity or their job role. 

Explain what a real-time game engine is and how it is used. 

Games

Film

Automotive

Explain what the Unity real-time engine does.

Describe how real-time creation software is used in different industries.

Identify a variety of real-time creators by their usage of Unity or their job role.

Explain what a real-time game engine is and how it is used.

1.1 Define the term “real-time.”

1.2 Explain what the Unity real-time engine does.

1.3 Describe how real-time creation software is used in different industries.

1.4 Identify a variety of real-time creators by their usage of Unity or their job role.

1.5 Explain what a real-time game engine is and how it is used.

Understand Unity’s history and role within the industries that rely on real-time creation.

Real-time creation

VR Curricular Framework Resources

AR Curricular Framework Resources 

Game Design Curricular Framework Resources  

Architecture, Engineering and Construction Curricular Framework Resources

Unity for Artists Curricular Framework Resources

AI, ML Curricular Framework Resources 

Real-time creation (Acc-Sol)

Unity is an interactive content creation platform. While it’s best known as a tool for making games, it has been embraced by many different industries for its flexibility and ease of use.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about a few different industries that use Unity, and how they use Unity in their day to day work.

Unity is a real-time engine, which allows for experiences that are fully interactive — not just for the end- user, but for the creator as well. Unity allows creators to quickly iterate and collaborate on a project with their colleagues, which speeds up the development process and helps the team arrive at a finished product that fully meets the needs of the user.

The term real-time describes how quickly an image is rendered (or displayed) on the screen, even as you're changing it. The goal of real-time software is to render images so quickly that you can freely interact in a virtual environment without any noticeable delay. 

Although it's easy to take real-time interaction for granted today, in our games and other applications, it wasn't always the norm. In the past, computers weren’t powerful enough to quickly render visually complex scenes with physically accurate lighting and effects. In fact, a single still image might take several minutes, hours, or even days to render. Iterations were very costly, and experimentation was almost unheard of. New ideas that might improve the final product were often ignored for the sake of meeting the deadline.

Real-time technology grew out of video games to meet the demand for interactivity. Early real-time applications were able to sacrifice visual quality, animation complexity, and special effects. As computer processors have evolved, real-time has increased in quality, yielding the real-time photorealistic images in today’s games.

Today, real-time 3D has changed not only video game development, but many other industries as well. Watch the video below to hear how real-time 3D has transformed the way people design, build, and innovate.

Unity is not limited to any specific industry — any industry that needs to create content, especially interactive content, benefits from creating with Unity. Every day, new and unique experiences created with Unity hit the market. Below are a few examples of the larger industries that use Unity to create their content.

In the games industry, real-time technology means that games can be developed easier and faster than ever before. Game developers can work in real-time using the Unity Editor, or even build games right on their phones using Struckd. 

Real-time technology allows game developers to work rapidly in real-time. But it also gives them a lot more artistic choices — they can achieve real-world visual accuracy, or they can design stylized worlds with non-realistic lighting and physics. Watch the video below for a sampling of the broad range of styles available to today's real-time game developers.

Since its release in 2005, Unity has been used to create thousands of games across 20 different platforms. Made With Unity (MWU) games make up around 50% of what’s available on PC, console, and mobile platforms today, and about 60% of platforms in the emerging XR (Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality) gaming world. So, if you enjoy playing games, the odds that you’ve played a game Made With Unity are overwhelming! 

Media and Entertainment (M&E) includes several different but closely related industries, such as Film, Animation, and advertising. Unity greatly decreases the time it takes to create films and animations by allowing artists and animators to see their creations come to life in real time, saving on render time and allowing studios to release high quality content faster.

Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry literally builds the world around us. With Unity, these companies combine traditional design and building techniques with cutting edge technology, allowing them to design faster and build more efficiently and safely.

Watch the video below to learn how companies that design and build some of the world's most innovative structures use Unity and real-time 3D.

Automotive, Transportation, and Manufacturing

Real-time 3D has transformed the way automobiles and other vehicles and machines are designed, manufactured, and sold. For example, automotive engineers use Unity’s VR capabilities to create product designs and factory floor mockups that speed up iteration time and significantly lower development costs. Also, automotive marketers create real-time configurators with Unity that allow customers to view and customize photoreal 3D products and visualize them in a variety of dynamic environments while shopping online.

Watch the video below to see a compilation of applications for Unity in the automotive industry. 

A worker wearing a hardhat and safety vest on a construction site looks up at a tablet he holds above his head. The tablet displays an AR rendering of what the building being constructed will look like from his vantage point later in the construction process

9 DeKalb On-Site Development App by SHoP Architects-- Made with Unity

A digital rendering of a Lexus coupe sitting in the center of a display room.

Lexus Configurator by Light & Shadows--Made With Unity

The best way to learn about something is to experience it for yourself! We’ve created an application that will allow you to experiment with five different use cases in different industries. While these are small examples, they represent real applications in these fields today. While you’re exploring the app, try to identify the differences and similarities in the ways these industries use Unity. How does Unity help them? What does Unity seem particularly good at, based on your experience?

Unity is used in many industries in many different ways, but what they all have in common is the need to see, understand, or interact with physical objects in virtual spaces, making the unreal real. To that end, creators create with Unity in just about every industry and job sector, and more are discovering the potential of real-time creation every day. In virtual space, anyone can make anything — all they need is Unity and an idea.

In the next tutorial, you’ll learn how professionals use Unity in their day-to-day work as you explore the real-time production cycle. 

What can Unity do?

1. Overview

2. What is "real-time"?

3. What industries use Unity?

4. Experience Unity in action

5. Next steps

Complete this tutorial