And that’s a wrap! We had a blast at this year’s State of Unreal—it was awesome to host it at Unreal Fest for the first time. Huge announcements on The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo, the latest UE 5.6 news, big updates to MetaHuman and exciting IP coming to UEFN made for a spellbinding show. 

Practical Magic 2 is set for release on September 18, 2026. Here's everything we know so far about the hit Warner Bros. sequel.

When a bicoastal couple decided to build a new home along the Lieutenant River in the historic town of Old Lyme, Connecticut, they wanted privacy and plenty of space. They also wanted to capitalize on the unique quality of the area's natural light—an effect so magical that a century ago, it attracted numerous American Impressionist painters, who promptly dubbed it "Lyme light." Courtesy of MarvinIn this, the owners succeeded mightily: Among them, the project's three buildings—main house, carriage house, and pool house—feature no fewer than 110 windows and doors. And for each one, the build team turned to the Marvin Ultimate collection. The handcrafted, customizable windows and glass-paned doors, frequently arrayed to create "walls of glass," allow for an assortment of divided-light designs that deliver on three fronts at once: creating intriguing patterns and subtle gradations of light in every room, giving life and sparkle to the exterior, and, of course, ​​artfully framing the landscape beyond. "It's right on a tributary that leads to the Connecticut River—you've got marsh, cattails, osprey nests," says builder Nick Sapia of Connecticut-based Sapia Builders. "You want to do anything you can to capture that view."Ultimate windows from Marvin are available in a wide range of styles, sizes, and shapes—including specialty options such as triangles, octagons, and the arch-top windows shown in the living room above—and can also be customized to fit a specific placement challenge or design idea. On this home's front facade, for instance, a round window high on the gable was custom-designed with an intricate combination of curved and straight muntins dividing the panes of glass. "It was a tribute to one in the original house on the site," says Sapia, who worked with architect Scot Samuelson and interior designer Janine Dowling to bring the project to life. "If you can dream it and draw it, Marvin can build it."Courtesy of MarvinThis wealth of options allows for visual variety—the home features casement, picture, and specialty windows—while maintaining a cohesive overall look. The resolutely traditional exterior is enlivened by swaths of SDL (simulated divided lite) windows, which deliver the classic gridded look of multiple individual panes without sacrificing the energy efficiency of single panes. Combining those with Ultimate Swinging doors, as in the pool house below, creates sweeping glass "walls" that offer the greatest possible amount of light and access to views.Courtesy of MarvinThe Ultimate collection represents the brand's most extensive selection of features, options, colors, and finishes. Each piece of wood is individually sanded, conditioned, stained, and oven-cured (ensuring structural integrity) for a stately, high-end look both inside and out. "You want a sense of permanency," Sapia says. "Something of that quality and craftsmanship tends to have longevity."The windows invite that spellbinding Lyme light indoors, of course, but it's the vistas outside that steal the show. "From any point on the first floor, because of the glass, you're brought into the site—literally," Sapia says. "When you have such a dynamic view, with a bend in the river, the beautiful work inside the house almost goes away. You walk in and go right to the windows to gaze out."To learn more about Marvin Ultimate windows and doors, click here.

“Everything I did and wrote was based in love and my desire to entertain and bring glee and creativity to young people and to everyone,” Paul Reubens says in the newly released Max docuseries, Pee-wee As Himself. Reubens ascended to cultural ubiquity in the 1980s with his smash hit character, Pee-wee Herman. First as a live show, then in the Tim Burton film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and perhaps most lastingly, in the television series Pee-wee’s Playhouse that ran for five seasons, Reubens undeniably did just what he set out to. Visually, the show conveyed an off the wall giddiness that didn’t confine itself to typical television set design rules.The jagged-edged red door, the wagging-armed chair named Chairry, the beatnik jazz band’s brick wall alcove—an entire bustling world was contained in the walls of Pee-wee’s playhouse, from the very first episode. The walls and floor were painted with abstract patterns in a variety of colors, and tchotchkes abounded. From Chairry to the three flowers in the flowerbed to Magic Screen, the decorations were his friends and his friends were his decorations. His space was very much alive. “He’s a really imaginative person who doesn’t let other people make rules for him, so naturally his place would reflect his personality,’” Gary Panter, the show’s lead production designer, told the New York Times in a 1987 interview.Chairry (right of centre) and other Pee-wee’s Playhouse staples including Dirty Dog, Chicky Baby, and Cool Cat in the background. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesPanter was an alt comic artist who’d designed the original stage sets for Reubens before Pee-wee made his jump to the screen. He worked with two other then-comic artists, Wayne White and Ric Heitzman, to flesh out the world further for the television series. While in retrospect, people might lump the Playhouse in with the rest of the ’80s postmodern milieu, the team had rules to avoid fitting too cleanly into that aesthetic. “Jokingly, we said, ‘Okay, no more ’80s new wavy stuff,” White says. “No flying triangles and squiggly lines.” The result was a surrealist explosion of color and pattern, a Pop Art take on a ’50s sitcom set.Laurence Fishburne appeared as Cowboy Curtis on the show. Photo: John Kisch Archive/Getty ImagesGiven their punk-leaning backgrounds, their approach to creating the sets had a DIY sensibility. The first season of the show was filmed in a loft in SoHo, rather than on a soundstage in Los Angeles, and the team got crafty figuring out how to create the things they’d drawn up, rather than passing the designs off to fabricators to see them through. “We were downtown New York artists struggling to build the stuff in our apartments and little studios here and there,” White tells AD. “It was mostly sculptors and painters and cartoonists [working on the show]. It didn’t have that institutional network of showbiz builders like LA has, there were no scenic artists, no guys that build props, things like that.”This fact is surely part of what gives Pee-wee’s Playhouse its art-school-project sheen: despite its success, it truly was a passion project for those that worked on it. “Being trusted to do this stuff gave me just so much confidence and drive. It really supercharged my sense of being an artist,” says White. “I was 28 years old, and I was willing to do anything. We burned very brightly that first year.”Paul Reubens filming an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Photo: John Kisch Archive/Getty ImagesFrom the start, Reubens let the production design team explore their wildest ideas. White’s comic strips (like Miss Car, which was published in the East Village Eye prior to Pee-wee’s Playhouse) featured anthropomorphized items, making the jump to Chairry and co. not too far of a leap. “I didn’t have to change [my style] at all,” White says. “I stepped right into another medium and it was a big lesson for me. You could take a vision or an idea or your imagination through all these different mediums, and they’re all really just the same.”Gary Panter and Paul Reubens. Courtesy of HBOPanter, White, and Heitzman didn’t worry about notes or being penned in by the network or anyone else. They were free to explore, to create as many drawings and iterations of items as were needed, from which Reubens would pick the option that he thought worked best. Reubens was already a major star by the time that the show was picked up, so it was intimidating to work with him so loosely at first. Still, “Paul was so interested in what we're doing that he quickly just became a friend,” White explains. “It was easy to go along with quickly, because he was a weirdo artist like me.” Reubens’s comfortability with his own oddity is what made the show so spellbinding, even for the adults who were well outside of the target demographic. Each episode presented an opportunity to disappear into a world where strangeness was not only expected, but celebrated too. “I do remember being on set and that it was the most exciting thing I’d ever done,” Natasha Lyonne, who was in six episodes of the show as a child, says in the docuseries. “I think it felt like permission to be myself.”Paul Reubens and Chairry. Courtesy of HBOFor much of Pee-wee Herman’s heyday, Reubens exclusively gave interviews in character. Though the new documentary thoroughly punctures that facade, the glimpses it offers into the Hollywood home that Reubens lived in from the mid-80s onward show that his personal taste wasn’t all that distant from the wacky world of Pee-wee. There were certainly no talking chairs, but still, the space was filled with color, pattern, and oodles of nostalgic memorabilia. Reubens also nurtured the wildlife that lived in the hills surrounding his house, spreading seeds for deer and crows, growing plenty of plants, and welcoming even the coyotes, wolves, and skunks of the area too. Though Pee-wee’s open door policy with his neighbors is a stretch further than Reubens’s, the nurturing relationship with these creatures certainly feels Pee-wee-esque.The Pee-wee’s Playhouse set. Courtesy of HBODecades after the final episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse aired, White cites the lasting brilliance of the sets to Reubens himself. “He is the nuclear reactor core of it all. Without him, none of this would have had the magic that it had,” White says. “The character of Pee-wee was so resonant with people and then it just radiated out from there. I give him most of the credit for creating the magic, and we just kind of floated along on it. It was such a strong character and such an enchanted world that it couldn't help and bring out the best of any artist.”

The sparks from a magic spell, plumes of smoke, ultraviolet or electric blue energy bolts, city lights seen through mist or rain, open fields of swaying grass... It’s hard to imagine a modern game without the evocative power of visual effects.Visual effects are the key to creating deeply immersive experiences for your players. And thanks to continuous hardware advancements, what used to be available only for Hollywood blockbusters can now be attained in real-time.VFX Graph is one of several major toolsets available in Unity for artists and designers to create with little or no coding. With its node-based visual logic, you can create any number of simple to complex effects for projects across genres.Our new 120-page e-book, The definitive guide to creating advanced visual effects in Unity, guides artists, designers, and programmers using the Unity 2021 LTS version of VFX Graph. Use it as a reference for producing richly layered, real-time visual effects for your games.The VFX Graph creates GPU-accelerated particle systems, and therefore requires compute shader support to maintain compatibility with target devices. It works with theUniversal Render Pipeline (URP, including the 2D Renderer) and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).Compared to the Built-in Particle System, the VFX Graph can drive more particles with faster simulation, customizable behaviors, extensibility, Camera Buffer access, and native Shader Graph integration. You can use any custom shader created in Shader Graph to target VFX Graph. These shaders are able to use new lighting models like HDRP hair or fabric, and can even modify particles at the vertex level to enable effects like birds with flapping wings, wobbling particles like soap bubbles, and so much more.The VFX Graph e-book is as beautiful to look at as it is inspiring and informative. Created in collaboration with Wilmer Lin, a veteran VFX artist from the film and games industries, and internal experts on the Unity Graphics team, it’s generous in scope, level of detail, thoughtful instruction, images and videos, and numerous downloadable resources and references for VFX authoring in Unity.Let’s take a quick look at what’s in the guide.Get a thorough understanding of each part of the VFX Graph, starting with the VFX Graph Asset and component, and the VFX Graph window. Learn how to create logic with Systems, Contexts, Blocks, Properties, Operators, Blackboards, Subgraphs, Events, Attributes, and more.Visual effects often involve many moving pieces. Connecting them to the correct points in your application is essential to integrating them at runtime. You’ll learn about the available tools for playing back an effect and how to use them:Event Binders:These listen for several different things that happen in your scene and react to specific actions at runtime.Timeline:Sequence visual effects with Activation Tracks to send events to your graph at select moments. Gain precise control with pre-scripted timing (e.g., playing effects during a cutscene).Property Binders: These link scene or gameplay values to the Exposed properties on your Blackboard so that your effects react to changes in the scene, in real-time.Colorful swarms of Particle Strips, explosive effects for a crashing Meteorite, and an extra slimy GooBall: These are just a few of the effects you’ll find in the Visual Effect Graph Samples(HDRP).Each sample highlights different scenarios involving the VFX Graph. For a better understanding, this section of the e-book examines how some of these samples were created, namely through the use of:Shader and VFX Graph togetherGPU Events to trigger other systems in the same graphOrganic movement added to Particle Strips via the Noise Operator, and available Blocks for customizing each Particle Strip’s texture mapping, spawning, and orientationA single graph to drive other graphs in a visual effectA Spawn Context to trigger many other effectsExperimental mesh sampling to fetch data from a mesh and include the result in the graphSee the e-book for more clips that show the different samples, including the following introduction to the GooBall scene.Effects aren’t isolated in a vacuum. Often you’ll need to supply them with external data to achieve your intended look.What if you want the genie to emerge from a magic lamp? Or you’d like to integrate a hologram? While you can accomplish much of this with math functions and Operators, you might need the effect to interact with more complex shapes and forms.This section explains how to use three Data types supported in Unity to enhance your visual effects: Point Caches, Signed Distance Fields, and Vector Fields. Other tools you’ll learn about are the VFXToolbox, which features additional tools for Unity VFX artists, and Flipbook Texture Sheets to bake animated effects into a sprite.Other chapters in the guide cover optimization techniques for visual effects, future developments for VFX Graph, and finally, a long list of tutorials and videos. We’re thrilled to be able to offer you this valuable resource, which is free to download (as all of our technical e-books are). Please don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us in this forum.For a full list of available Unity e-books, check out the How-to hub or browse the documentation under Working in Unity > Best practices guide.