3D AI Demos Gone Wild: Unity 6.3, Hunyuan Breakthroughs

The last time I really tested 3D AI tools was back in 2024, and it was rough. Over the past week I have been catching up on how far things have come in 2025, and the honest answer is we are still not fully there yet. But a handful of tools have made real, practical progress worth having on your radar. A focused video pulling it all together is on the way as I put more of these closed betas through their paces. In the meantime, here is the weekly roundup, plus a few of the demos I bookmarked this week.

New tech updates

Unity 6.3 LTS releases

Unity shipped its first Long-Term Support release since 6.0, which means two years of guaranteed support. For artists the headline changes are improved GPU lightmapping with a new xAtlas-based packing algorithm and much stronger 2.5D support in URP, so you can render 3D meshes through the 2D Renderer and light them alongside sprites. Shader Graph also expands with custom lighting samples, dedicated terrain shader support, up to 8 texture coordinates, and better SubGraph handling for large graphs.

ZBrush updates

ZBrush added a dedicated Retopo Brush that brings TopoGun-style retopology directly inside the app. ZBrush for iPad 2026.1 also added a Photogrammetry module, so you can scan an object with the iPad camera and start sculpting on it immediately.

GDevelop 5.6 adds 3D

The open-source, no-code engine GDevelop released 5.6 with a native 3D editor, extending its previously 2D-focused toolset. It will not replace Unity or Godot for professional work, but it is a compelling option for building interactive 3D scenes without learning C# or GDScript.

From the community

A few standout demos I bookmarked this week: Gaussian Splatting plus Nano Banana Pro for real-time VR and AR, a 3D model built with Hunyuan 3D inside Scenario, World Labs Marble combined with Octane, an experimental Blender add-on wiring ComfyUI in for native texture previews, SAM 3D Objects plus splats plus Marble to patch close-range splat limitations, another Marble test with an FPS setup and lens simulation in Unity, Hunyuan 3D-Part, and a Three.js plus Spark plus World Labs experiment.