Unity Technologies has announced that Unity 3.4 is available for download today at http://unity3d.com/download .

The new version, through the integration of Allegorithmic's Substance technology, features highly customizable procedural textures that can be adjusted both within the Unity editor and at runtime, says David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. Using substances in Unity, developers can stream high quality textures in just a few kilobytes, significantly reducing download times, he adds.

Those textures can also be modified in real time on Mac or PC systems or baked into traditional textures for mobile platforms. Substances also include smart filters allowing artists to make bitmaps and optimize their texturing pipeline.

Unity, Unity Technologies' entry level product, is free for commercial use by startups, small companies, students and individual developers. To get the free, feature-packed Unity for creating games and interactive visualizations, visit http://unity3d.com/unity/download . The company's premier product, Unity Pro, retains its current price of US$1,500 per developer seat. All Unity Pro 3.x licenses automatically upgrade to version 3.4 free of charge.