Unity Weta Tools
unity.com
unity.com
It will be a tremendous technical feat if they have managed to bring the deep functionality of what were Weta's internal tools to a more general audience of artists. The key difference will be that these artists won't have direct access to the developers who wrote the tools, as the Weta artists did.
Packaging powerful graphics tools within an artist-friendly interface and workflow is challenging.
It says "Contact us", which probably means tailored license and support, and feedback of bugs/wishes, from a few selected clients.
Epic not only develops Unreal, but also develops games and is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry.
Unity... Well.
I mean, they both are. That's the whole point of this post here, to show Weta and Unity and the tools they have for movie makers. With your "Unity... Well.", what did you mean? Weta and and Unity aren't doing this?
It's good that Weta/Unity has competition now with Unreal and vice versa. We've seen what happens when one entity controls nearly everything (Looking at Autodesk here).
Currently, Weta is an outsider. Even internally, the acquisition had raised eyebrows among the trenches. The decision was criticized quite a bit by game developers using Unity as well. Unity itself is also somewhat troubled direction wise; their biggest product is a game engine, but their biggest revenue source is ads. They merged with an ad company recently, and purchased a movie VFX studio. They seem ready to pivot to whatever tech trend that they can catch.
> With your "Unity... Well.", what did you mean? Weta and and Unity aren't doing this?
I would say that "Epic is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry," while Unity isn't. Weta may be established in the movie industry, but the Weta Unity bought is the tool division, not the VFX division. Weta tools is also an acquisition, and does not create waves throughout Unity like how movie production make waves inside Epic. It is the difference between an acquisition to compete, and a vision to expand.
I don't think that's true if we group all the subscription, "strategic partnership" and other engine related revenue together but yeah, but Ads is about half.
To be fair it might not be that bad because there isn't that much revenue to gain from engine sales, especially using a subscription model (though I don't think royalties are bringing that much revenue for Epic either..). Unity is quite expensive if you're a hobyist, indie or just use it occasionally but it's dirt cheap if you're a mobile ad-filled P2W shovelware developer. IAP is monopolized by Apple/Google so Ads allows Unity to get a bit larger bite of the pie compared to the pittance (compared to overall revenue games made with it make) they get by directly selling the engine.
Weta was an entity of its own for longer than Unity as a company has been around. Unity bought them (well, the tech assets) as a reaction to Epic moving into and firmly setting up shop in the film business.
I mean, Mandalorean had already shot season one with Epic's tech before Unity woke up and decided/realised that it's being left behind [1].
Unity is a game engine company that hasn't produced a single game, moving into film making tools by never producing, and only acquiring, film making tools as a reaction to competition. Competition is good, but is Unity a company that can actually compete in this space? I hope so, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
[1]
Epic already boasting about it in early 2020 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/forging-new-paths-fo...
Unity announcing aquisition in late 2021 https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital
In a gold rush, the one selling the shovels is usually the one making the most profit.
To be fair this isn't that different from Adobe or Autodesk for instance. Aren't most professional tools, middleware etc. like that?
Historically game engines seem to have been an aberration in that regard since they were almost exclusively built in house and they sometimes made available to third parties with very limited commercial success in almost all cases.
I will say that Unity has better documentation and more learning resources due to the much bigger community around it, but I still found myself reimplementing several things that felt really basic on top of the various APIs.
Unreal's documentation can be really lackluster here and there and it can be difficult to find forum posts regarding specific topics, but after digging you often a function or component that is just the thing for your needs.
For everything there are multiple immature solutions stuffed by different teams. This is clearly a sign of managers grabbing fiefdom nd no one from the top tries to control it.
From what someone on HN has described before last time they showed something off like this, even if it's made internally at Unity it isn't really made with the tools you get downloading Unity yourself, it's made by an offshoot team who has people doing changes to the internals of the engine and writing custom hacks for this one use case. Then they ship the video, be it Adam (2016) or Enemies (2022) but then that's it, they go on to work on something else and the tweaks and tooling never get made into something viable for the main engine.
That's why Unity themselves managed to ship Adam [1] 7 years ago but since no one else has used Unity to create content like that since. Feels like it's almost to a yearly schedule now where Unity will do a PR demo like the link above on this topic and then nothing real ever materializes.
If the button says "contact us" or they ask for a waitlist, they haven't actually built or prepared much for release and are gauging for interest before likely starting to take engineering etc action on it.
Caveat: things may have changed a bit after my time.
I don't know how accessible or useful these will be to most game devs using Unity (apart from maybe Speedtree).
As far as I've seen, neither Unity nor Unreal have moved in this direction. Their "sequencer" solutions are IMHO unwieldy kludges that don't take advantage of new higher levels of abstraction for producing computer animation.
Allow the artist to interact with scene objects/characters as a director would. This requires what I used to refer to as "intelligent objects" back in the 80's. You would give directions and the object would figure out what it needed to do and how it would move.
So there would be a higher level of conversation with the 3D entities than "Set rotation keyframe."
Mocap requires a pretty significant amount of manual cleanup. The VFX industry is not a fan of Andy Serkis's bragging, to say the least. =P
I was extremely impressed with this motion matching presentation from GDC 2016. It blew folks away at the time. That said it hasn't really taken off everywhere AFAIK. Although it's definitely used in places (sports games!) https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023280/Motion-Matching-and-Th...
I guess I like the idea of "directing". But in terms of pure practicality I'm very skeptical. What does the directing toolset look like assuming we don't have full blown AGI? That's tough. And I'm not super bullish on AI for this type of thing. Although I've been consistently surprised by ML capabilities over the last year. So in 3 years I'll probably say "oh yeah it was obvious that ML could do that..."
The key point is tackling the animation "problem" from a new vantage point, as opposed to having an interface based on numerical interpolation as the final solution.
But in that one, the player pushes a button and the character moves accordingly, picking natural movements and combining / merging them into something that looks pretty natural. I don't think that'll be useful in close-ups, but can be for e.g. crowds or wider angle shots.
One advantage of authoring cinematics as opposed to games is the lack of a requirement for real-time interaction. The cinematic sequence can take a few seconds and analyze/plan accordingly.
Interested in knowing more :)
Neo-Visuals:
https://kaveh808.medium.com/10-17-000-polygons-should-be-eno...
Softimage:
https://kaveh808.medium.com/17-the-softimage-siggraph-sprint...
These were both 3D systems running on SGI boxes, which allowed interactive editing of animation curves. Softimage was used for "Jurassic Park" among other films.
From the sign-up page, this also doesn't seem to be a general access sort of thing. They want early adopters who already know a lot about this field of technology in order to give feedback and detailed bug reports.
Heck, even NerdForge used Unreal to create their virtual window on their new set. https://youtu.be/Vg1TGADF248?t=880
So instead, fwiw, anecdote: I work for a film production company and we ingest assets all the time from high end VFX houses. It's always from Unreal / used in Unreal in my experience. That's in LA/ Hollywood and high end productions. For all I know they use a lot of Unity in Bollywood or Europe.
Anecdotally, I've heard the same thing. Lots of articles will say things like, "ILM increased the resolution of StageCraft with its in-house renderer, Helios" but never explicitly say they dropped Unreal or exactly what changed.
I haven't heard of anyone using unreal for final frame rendering in film.
i.e. MPC had significant use of Unreal on set for mocap, Framestore has Unreal setup for previs and mocap (they hired some ex-games devs with Unreal experience to work on it)
ILM stagecraft is the 'hero' example (and as mentioned, they've got Helios now), but various studios are experimenting with it in various departments.
Disclaimer: I work for Weta, and above doesn't reflect anything about Weta (Gazebo, etc), it's all from friends/ex-colleagues at other studios...
Even smaller than the unreal operators is the pool of users that are purists enough to try and keep it all in-box.
Maya, Nuke, Houdini. These are the kings of the vfx world you were looking for if youre talking in the tens of thousands of artists out there, using pipelines that are conceptually 20 years in the making in some parts. The switch from Shake to Nuke was ~15 years ago and theres _still_ nothing good enough to replace it. Foundry scrapes as much money from us as possible because its a good product.
Unreal is amazing. Our shop is wrapping a project using it as the lighting pipeline, delivering to a Nuke team.
Unreal is not the everytool.
That sounds interesting! How come? Been doing devops stuff for a few years by now but also have some background in the Unity/HCI space which I enjoyed a lot. I'd be curious how this combination might be applicable in the VFX/media production industry.
I've also been on the fence of learning Unreal for a while now. Maybe you could shoot me an email (address is in my bio)? I'd be very interested in how the industry works outside the 'classic' VFX artist space.