The Publish Tab
This is the last stop in Unity. You pick which scenes go into the build, choose whether this is a brand new experience or an update to one you already published, and click one button. A few minutes later you have a live URL at unreality3d.com/yourname/yourproduct/ that works in any modern browser, on desktop, mobile, and VR headsets, with the finished files sitting in a GitHub repository you own.
🎯 Where to find it
Open the Creator Dashboard from the U3D menu → Creator Dashboard and click the Publish tab. Two buttons at the top switch between Publish Experience and Package for Market. This page covers Publish Experience; for the packager, see Selling on the U3D Market.
Before You Publish
The tab checks three things and tells you plainly if any are missing, with a Complete Setup button that takes you where you need to go:
- You're logged in to your Unreality3D account.
- Your creator name is reserved. This is the first half of your URL, and it's permanent.
- GitHub is connected. Publishing puts your build in a repository on your own GitHub account, so it needs your access token.
All three live on the Setup tab, covered step by step in Creator Dashboard & Setup. PayPal is not in this list: monetization is entirely optional and publishing works without it.
💡 One more thing worth checking
Save your scene and press Play once before publishing. The build captures your scene as saved, and a quick playtest catches the small things (a trigger you meant to wire, a video URL you meant to paste) while they're still easy to fix.
Unity also needs its Web build support installed to build anything at all. The template's setup covers this, but if Unity tells you it's missing, open Unity Hub, go to Installs, click the gear beside your Unity 6 install, choose Add Modules, and add Web Build Support.
Choosing Which Scenes Go In
The Build Scenes section shows what your build will contain. Your currently open scene is always included and marked as the entry point, which means it's what visitors land in when they open your URL. It can't be unchecked, because every experience needs somewhere to start.
Below that, any other scenes enabled in Unity's Build Settings appear with checkboxes, so you can include or leave out extra scenes as you like. If your active scene isn't in Build Settings at all, the tab tells you so and includes it anyway for this build. Nothing to fix.
If your project spans several scenes, get the build list right before publishing: add each scene in Unity's Build Settings, put the one visitors should land in first, and remove the template's default scene if you're not using it. Every scene you publish needs the Core prefab in it, or visitors will arrive somewhere with no player and no platform features.
Settings to Leave Alone
A handful of Unity settings are preconfigured in the template because publishing depends on them. They're easy to change by accident while poking around Project Settings, and the symptom is a build that fails or a live URL that never finishes loading, which is a miserable thing to debug backwards.
⚠️ Don't change the web publishing settings
Under Project Settings → Player → Web → Publishing Settings, the template ships with compression turned off, decompression fallback unchecked, and data caching unchecked. These are set the way the publishing pipeline expects. Changing them can stop your experience from loading at your live URL.
Two more worth knowing:
- Your build target should be Web. The template ships this way. If you've switched platforms to test something, switch back before publishing.
- Change your Product Name in the dashboard, not in Project Settings. Product Name is the second half of your URL, and changing it through the Publish tab keeps your project, your repository, and your live address in step. Editing it directly in Project Settings changes one and not the others. Your Unity project folder name, by contrast, has no effect on anything public, so name that whatever you like.
New Experience or Update to an Existing One
When the tab opens, it looks through your GitHub account for repositories that hold Unreality3D content and lists what it finds. You then pick one of two paths:
The tab helps you avoid the classic mix-up here. If your current Product Name matches a repository you already have, it says so and preselects the update option, while still letting you choose Create New if a separate project is what you actually want. If your Product Name doesn't match anything, it tells you a new repository will be created. Either way, you know what's about to happen before you click.
Refresh Repos re-checks your GitHub account, which is handy if you created or deleted something on GitHub while Unity was open.
Your Product Name
Product Name is the second half of your URL, and the Publish tab is the right place to set it: change it here and the repository name, the URL, and the publishing pipeline all stay in sync. Type your name and click Update.
A few rules keep names from breaking URLs, and the tab checks them before letting you publish:
- It can't be empty when you're creating a new repository.
- Keep it to 80 characters or fewer.
- Standard English letters and numbers only, since accented and non-Latin characters don't survive the trip into a URL cleanly.
- A short list of words is reserved because they collide with platform addresses: admin, api, www, test, app, web, dev, and staging.
If you set a Product Name that matches a repository you already have while Create New is selected, the tab stops and asks what you meant, so you don't accidentally split one project into two.
Adding a Thumbnail
Your thumbnail is the image that represents your experience across Unreality3D: the discovery pages, your creator page, and the carousel on the site. It's optional, and you can add one later, but adding it now means your work looks finished the moment it goes live.
Aim for 480×270 pixels (16:9) and keep it under 50KB so discovery pages stay fast. JPG compresses best.
Save it as exactly thumbnail.jpg in your Assets/_MyAssets folder.
That's all. The tab confirms it found your thumbnail, offers a View Current Thumbnail button so you can check you got the right image, and includes it automatically.
No thumbnail yet? The tab says so and gives you an Open _MyAssets Folder button to drop one in. You can also add or replace thumbnails any time from your online dashboard.
Make It Live
One button, three visible steps
Click Make It Live! and the tab shows you exactly where things stand, so you're never staring at a frozen window wondering whether it's working.
Unity builds your scenes for the web on your own machine, using your own Unity license. This is the longest step. Your first build is much slower than the rest, because Unity is preparing everything from scratch, so don't take that first wait as a sign of how it will always be.
The finished build is uploaded and placed into your GitHub repository, with large files handled for you.
GitHub finishes putting the files online, which usually takes one to two minutes. When it's done, your URL works.
If you chose to update an existing repository, you'll get one confirmation prompt before the process starts, since updating replaces what's currently live at that URL.
⚠️ Let it finish
Once publishing starts, leave Unity alone until it completes. The mode buttons lock while a publish is running so an in-progress deployment can't get hidden behind a tab switch, and interrupting the build partway leaves your repository in an awkward half-updated state that's simplest to fix by publishing again.
After It's Live
When the last step finishes, the tab hands you your URL along with three things to do with it:
- Open in Browser loads your live experience so you can see it the way visitors will.
- Copy URL puts the link on your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere.
- Update Repository returns you to the publish flow when you're ready to push changes.
That URL is yours to share anywhere: social posts, your portfolio, a client email, a Discord message. Anyone who opens it plays your experience in their browser with nothing to install.
💡 What just happened, in plain terms
Unity built your experience locally, the files went into a GitHub repository on your own account, GitHub Pages serves them, and Unreality3D routes your professional URL to them. You can browse that repository, download it, or keep working with it however you like. It's yours, and it stays yours. The full picture is in How Publishing Works.
Publishing Updates
Changing your live experience is the same flow with one difference: choose the existing repository instead of Create New. Your URL doesn't change, your links keep working, and visitors get the new version the next time they load the page.
There's no limit on how often you can republish, so treat it as a normal part of working rather than a big event. Fix a typo on a sign, swap a texture, add a room, publish again.
If Something Stalls
Two situations have specific handling worth knowing about:
The Go Live step doesn't confirm. Sometimes the build is uploaded fine but the final confirmation doesn't come back cleanly. The tab offers to open your GitHub Actions page, where you can watch the deployment finish for yourself. Often the URL is already working by the time you get there.
An authentication message appears mid-publish. This means your login session expired during the build, which is more likely on long builds. The tab walks you through the fix: log out of the Creator Dashboard, clear the Unity Console, close and reopen the Unity project, log back in, and publish again.
In both cases nothing is lost. Publishing again from a clean state is always safe.