Synty Studios builds some of the most recognizable Unity asset packs on the market. Their POLYGON series covers medieval fantasy, sci-fi horror, post-apocalyptic wastelands, and dozens of genres in between. Every pack ships with a polished demo scene, and for nearly a decade, those scenes have been assembled using Scene Fusion.
We sat down with the Synty team to ask how they work, what changed when they adopted real-time collaboration, and what they would tell other studios considering it.
Before Scene Fusion
Before Scene Fusion became part of their workflow, building a demo scene meant either routing everything through one person or passing the file back and forth sequentially.
“Before that it was the tedious back and forth of either one person in charge of the scene and just getting notes on it, or handing off the scene to each other to work on one at a time.”
The Synty team is fully remote, which made that kind of handoff especially costly. Feedback that could have happened in context, in the scene, had to be communicated through notes and reviews after the fact.
A Tool for Every Stage
Synty does not use Scene Fusion for one specific task. It runs through the entire production arc.
“Almost everything, from start to finish. We start out any pack in Scene Fusion to greybox out the demo scene, then use it to build out areas while being able to have instant feedback and/or just working together to build something quickly. Later we can then use it to QC the scene or make tweaks with more people in the room to give feedback. And finally we can use it for training or as an easier way to work something out together.”
The most common session is the two environment artists sitting in the same session all day, building in parallel and reacting to each other’s work. Broader reviews bring in up to six more people from the Polygon team and typically run an hour or two.
The Turning Point
Synty noticed the shift most clearly around the time of their POLYGON Pirates pack.
“You can almost see exactly where our demo production got an instant efficiency boost, because our demos became more detailed and expansive as we have been able to have multiple artists collaborating on a scene at once, meaning our scenes got better without any increase in time spent working on them.”
The improvement was not just about throughput. Having more people working in the scene simultaneously meant better ideas surfaced earlier, difficult areas got solved faster, and whole sections that would previously have needed multiple rounds of revision could get resolved in a single session.
POLYGON Sci-Fi Horror is another example the team points to. Multiple sessions had everyone flying through the scene adding story-telling details and world-building touches.
“We had a few sessions of everyone flying around and adding little story-telling easter eggs and world building throughout the scene which was really fun. But really every single pack we do benefits so much from having more people in the scene together, talking about it in context.”
Sessions at Scale
Most Synty sessions stay under five people, but the tool has been put to larger tests. For their 10th anniversary, the entire company of 25 people joined a single scene for an internal contest.
“Having the whole company in there at once doesn’t happen too often, though we have done a few sessions where we either wanted everyone’s feedback or just wanted to do something fun with everyone.”
Scene Fusion also appears regularly on Synty’s public Twitch and YouTube livestreams, where viewers routinely ask how the team is working together in real time inside Unity.
Adding Reactor for Game-Scale Review
More recently, Synty has added Reactor to their process, using it to walk through finished scenes at actual game scale before shipping.
“Reactor has been great to get a proper sense of scale. We always have scale characters in the scene for reference, but seeing it at eye-level with other characters running around gives a whole new appreciation for the size of everything.”
This has proven especially useful for their map packs, which are designed to be used as complete shipped environments rather than just asset showcases. Navigating a scene with other characters moving around surfaces layout and proportion issues that a static Editor view does not catch.
“It’s been especially helpful for our maps we’ve been releasing recently where they’re specifically created to be used as-is rather than just a demo scene showing off all the assets in context. It’s meant that we can get a better idea of how it will actually be used and can make adjustments accordingly.”
The Outcome
When asked to quantify the time savings, the Synty team put quality first.
“For us the major benefit is in quality. The fact that we can all be contributing ideas in real time means iteration happens much faster and we can come to a better result. That being said, because we can get in there and figure things out it also means it has potential to save about a day per week of back and forth and reworks.”
On recommending it to other studios:
“100%. I don’t know why it’s not a standard feature in Unity.”