8 ms·

Unity Weta Tools

106 points by Chazprime 3y ago

amanzi 3y ago
Good to see them using the macrons appropriately (unlike the title of this post). "weta" has quite a different meaning to "wētā" :-)
- tomilola39 3y ago
  How so?
  - Nition 3y ago
    Wētā: https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/9244 https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/9244 Weta: https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/45259 https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/45259
    - rendaw 3y ago
      In Maori, but in English they were dropped: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weta#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weta#English
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    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.
- striking 3y ago
  HN strips lots of Unicode stuff from titles.
kaveh808 3y ago
I 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.
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  > 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.
  - larusso 3y ago
    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.
- troupo 3y ago
  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.
  - GoofballJones 3y ago
    "...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).
    - FoodWThrow 3y ago
      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.
CreepGin 3y ago
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).
- Pathogen-David 3y ago
  They aren't really targeting gamedevs here. Both Unity and Unreal have been trying to win over Hollywood for a while now.
  - kaveh808 3y ago
    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.
    - forrestthewoods 3y ago
      What do you think is the future beyond interpolated key frames?
      - kaveh808 3y ago
        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."
thrillgore 3y ago
Given how quickly Unreal has taken the (already taxed) VFX space by storm, they are desperately trying to catch up.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  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.
  - all2 3y ago
    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.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      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.
  - georgeecollins 3y ago
    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.
  - Kyrio 3y ago
    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.
    - 3y ago
mkoubaa 3y ago
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.
peteforde 3y ago
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.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  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.
  - shortrounddev2 3y ago
    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
  - peteforde 3y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/Vg1TGADF248?t=880
raincole 3y ago
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 :)".
- ydruts 3y ago
  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.
DeathArrow 3y ago
So, this is Unity's equivalent of 3D Max and Maya?
wqqwdfsaadd 3y ago
[dead]

106 points by Chazprime 3y ago

Good to see them using the macrons appropriately (unlike the title of this post). "weta" has quite a different meaning to "wētā" :-)

tomilola39 3y ago
How so?
- Nition 3y ago
  Wētā: https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/9244 https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/9244 Weta: https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/45259 https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/45259
  - rendaw 3y ago
    In Maori, but in English they were dropped: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weta#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weta#English
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  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.
striking 3y ago
HN strips lots of Unicode stuff from titles.

kaveh808 3y ago

I 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.

readyplayernull 3y ago
> 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.
- larusso 3y ago
  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.
troupo 3y ago
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.
- GoofballJones 3y ago
  "...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).
  - FoodWThrow 3y ago
    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.

CreepGin 3y ago

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).

Pathogen-David 3y ago
They aren't really targeting gamedevs here. Both Unity and Unreal have been trying to win over Hollywood for a while now.
- kaveh808 3y ago
  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.
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    What do you think is the future beyond interpolated key frames?
    - kaveh808 3y ago
      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."

thrillgore 3y ago

Given how quickly Unreal has taken the (already taxed) VFX space by storm, they are desperately trying to catch up.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
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.
- all2 3y ago
  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.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    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.
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  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.
- Kyrio 3y ago
  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.
  - 3y ago

mkoubaa 3y ago

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.

peteforde 3y ago

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.

squeaky-clean 3y ago
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.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  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
- peteforde 3y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/Vg1TGADF248?t=880

raincole 3y ago

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 :)".

ydruts 3y ago
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.

DeathArrow 3y ago

So, this is Unity's equivalent of 3D Max and Maya?

wqqwdfsaadd 3y ago

[dead]