Unity Weta Tools
unity.comI worked at Weta prior to the Unity acquisition.
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.
> a more general audience of artists
It says "Contact us", which probably means tailored license and support, and feedback of bugs/wishes, from a few selected clients.
That is precisely how Unity works already. Yes they have the forums etc. But what gets into a fix release and even if a breaking change gets promoted to an LTS version is decided by big corp license agreement.
The problem with Unity is that they build or integrate tools they don't use themselves.
Epic not only develops Unreal, but also develops games and is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry.
Unity... Well.
I spent 6 months trying to learn Unity and 6 months trying to learn Unreal after that and it really shows that Epic use the engine themselves. It shows in how there's usually a "default" way to do things instead of 3 different half-integrated tools for everything, it shows in the sensible defaults, in the documentation... It's also pretty evident that the engine was designed with first person shooters in mind, but I find it easier to adapt Unreal to a different genre than to figure out the best way to do anything in Unity.
Having also used both for several months each, I feel the same way overall.
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.
I'll agree that Unity had more and better tutorials, especially for beginners. But I found myself using the reference documentation more than tutorials and I liked the engine and blueprints docs in Unreal better, but maybe that's just me.
I'd argue it's less of dog fooding issue, as Unity does use the engine and plenty of others use it too, than a badly organization issue.
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.
Unity doesn't really use Unity Engine, they don't ship a game with it or use it in the real world.
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.
There is an accelerated solution team that uses the engine.
That’s the best thing about unreal blueprints. They have excellent discoverability of the engine api
"...is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry".
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).
Unity acquired Weta; Epic collaborated with movies themselves, to the point that their CTO even played as an extra in the latest Matrix movie. I think that is the distinction they were going for 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.
> biggest revenue source is ads
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.
> With your "Unity... Well.", what did you mean?
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
>Unity is a game engine company that hasn't produced a single game, moving into film making tools by never producing
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.
> 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.
In a gold rush, the one selling the shovels is usually the one making the most profit.
That in no way suggests they're the one designing the best new sort of shovel.
I worked at Unity prior to the Weta acquisition.
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 work at Unity. Everything’s either in late beta or ready for launch.
I confirm that timoni does work at Unity, I'd trust their word.
Had to read the youtube comments to understand a little what this is about. So it seems to be a suite of tools (Ziva, Speedtree, SyncSketch, Parsec, Eddy, Deep Comp) that's separate from the Unity Editor and aimed towards (film?) artists.
I don't know how accessible or useful these will be to most game devs using Unity (apart from maybe Speedtree).
They aren't really targeting gamedevs here. Both Unity and Unreal have been trying to win over Hollywood for a while now.
I think there is an opportunity to rethink a system for computer animation. Existing DCC packages are stuck in the late-80's mindset of animation consisting of interpolated values between keyframes. I wrote two such systems in that timeframe: Neo-Visuals and Softimage.
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.
Clicked profile and saw MIT math and the rest. That's impressive.
What do you think is the future beyond interpolated key frames?
We have moved the artists up in part from animation to puppeteering (mocap). The next step is to move up to directing.
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."
Hrmmmm.
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..."
I see this as a long-term approach which will improve over time. Mocap can play a part, as can AI -- though I'm no expert in it, it's hard to argue with the results produced by tools such as Midjourney -- and other techniques.
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.
That makes sense in a video game sense; games like Fifa (or whatever it was called recently) have pushed dynamic animations forward by a lot, first by being able to transition seamlessly from one animation to the next, most recent one with volumetric caputure, so they can make 3d animated characters just from multi angle video footage.
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.
The idea would be to cherry pick simpler cases, such as crowds and "background" actors. Hero shots and closeups would evolve over time as the techniques improved.
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.
Westworld season 4 portrays how a system like this could be used. Sci fi tech at this point, but "something like that" would be the goal/vision.
> I wrote two such systems in that timeframe: Neo-Visuals and Softimage.
Interested in knowing more :)
I wrote up some recollections.
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.
Ziva has runtimes in Unity and Unreal Engine.
Every piece of news about Unity reads like "we've dominated the most profitable gaming market, which is mobile, so we don't care about game dev any more :)".
Not really a new concept that a company wants to diversify and do more than one thing? The people working on Weta Tools are not the same people working on the engine.
I'm a long-term hobbyist Unity user, and I do not understand what I'm looking at. While I get that I'm not the intended audience, I'm coming from a "please start by explaining in clear terms why this is important, instead of assuming that if we're here, we already know" place.
This isn't really meant for current Unity users to use for additional features. This is to bring people into Unity who normally use 3dsMax, Houdini, After-effects, etc when making films and digital art.
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.
One thing I would love to see is for Unity to catch up to Unreal when it comes to virtual studio applications. So far as I understand, there's no technical reason that people couldn't be tooling Unity to do the next Mandalorian.
Heck, even NerdForge used Unreal to create their virtual window on their new set. https://youtu.be/Vg1TGADF248?t=880
I know a lot of film studios actually use Unreal for animation and simulation these days, so I wonder if this is Unity trying to get in on that
Good to see them using the macrons appropriately (unlike the title of this post). "weta" has quite a different meaning to "wētā" :-)
HN strips lots of Unicode stuff from titles.
How so?
In Maori, but in English they were dropped: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weta#English
More importantly, why? While I get you wouldn't want to zalgo-ise the site or encourage the use of unicode emoji, stripping or preventing the use of diacritics seems like it's excluding a lot of languages.
Given how quickly Unreal has taken the (already taxed) VFX space by storm, they are desperately trying to catch up.
Where has unreal take vfx by storm? If you are talking about the live on set screens, that is a very tiny and exotic use case.
I tried to find data but couldn't quickly, so maybe someone else can find a comparison study.
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.
Not to mention most of those use ILM Stagecraft which, despite being Unreal-based in its first version, has been using a custom engine for some time now.
Do you have source? From what I heard last, they're using a heavily modified version of Unreal.
Here's a HN thread asking the same question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29169143
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 heard as well that they moved away to custom software.
Some animation studios use Unreal. Watching the credits of some anime, I sometimes see credits for "Unreal Engine Developers"
Unreal is used by all the major VFX vendors whether it be for virtual production, previz or final frame rendering.
charitably asserting that you are right in the sense that it can be found. I'm a vfx compositor turned devops crossover. The tooling at this point is decades old, in concept. There are many "reimagining"s of vfx pipelines with Unreal at its core, but even these pipes have flame/nuke/fusion somewhere downstream.
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.
> I'm a vfx compositor turned devops crossover.
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.
Mainly because in 2019 I was offered an opportunity to be the "tech guy" for a small startup and you know how those go. Since I was alone it just became a DevOps/dev/helpdesk role over time.
Classic, thanks a lot!
I always found the King Kong did extras very educational. There was a lot about previz https://youtu.be/GhOVR8DTULc
Where are you getting this information? Not only have I never heard of this, "the major VFX vendors" don't really do 'virtual production' or previz, with the exception of the ILM stagecraft stuff.
I haven't heard of anyone using unreal for final frame rendering in film.
I think they're overselling it, but Unreal is fairly heavily being used in the early parts of pipelines at various studios, certainly more than Unity engine itself...
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...
I worked on Gazebo in its early days.
Search YouTube for "Unreal" film previews. There are so many out there that were all realized with the Unreal engine. Maybe it's the algorithm, but all I see is stuff done in Unreal and I haven't seen anything done in Unity.
I searched for that and 'unreal engine film preview'. There were a few cinematics that have been made, but there was nothing that had to do with major vfx studios or even upcoming mainstream films.
This seems to be the shop that developed the loki physics simulation interface. I'm looking for that and don't see it here, just seems like they're throwing that brand name around for general purpose animation tools.
So, this is Unity's equivalent of 3D Max and Maya?