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Most notably, this is laying off their entire acquisition of Weta Digital which was an audacious $1.6B purchase. After which Unity did nothing to take the prop

by dagmx 3y ago

Most notably, this is laying off their entire acquisition of Weta Digital which was an audacious $1.6B purchase. After which Unity did nothing to take the proposed products into the marketplace.

nithayakumar 3y ago
Just Weta FX - those were the guys and gals that used Weta tooling for producing films and such. Not Weta Tools - those are the guys and gals building and maintaining the Weta tools
- qwytw 3y ago
  But it seems that 265 is pretty much the entire headcount of Weta Digital’s 'tools department' they have acquired back in 2021? From their announcement: "Unity welcomes Weta Digital’s world-class engineering talent of 275 engineers that are known for architecting, building, and maintaining Weta Digital tools and core pipeline." So it just seems they have just thrown away $1.6 billion. If they were unable to commercialize any of their tools while they still had the people who built them it will be entirely hopeless now.
bhouston 3y ago
I think they were not easily commercialized. I was a VFX software developer and internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. VFX devs are not the usual product guys, they are usually either R&D/math guys or hackers, with little in between. The way to commercialize WETA stuff would be to make new product teams and basically redo much of the work with professional software devs and figure out where the original VFX R&D had gaps - and it always has massive gaps. Unity just went nuts with wacky acquisitions the last couple years and this was one of them.
- Narann 3y ago
  > internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. HT: That’s also an important point explained when we talk about internal VS commercial (or build VS buy) in the animation/VFX industry. Internal softwares does less than 5% (or less) of commercial products, but they are doing it in a straight, fab compatibility way. No effort is made in making the tool working with your fab, the tool is shaped for the fab from scratch. That’s the value of internal tools. Converting those is viable product is very risky.
- MrScruff 3y ago
  Yeah, you could see this outcome a mile away. While there are examples of in-house VFX software being commercialised (eg. most of the Foundry's offerings) it's generally not built to the same spec as commercial software. There are plenty of good developers but the teams are smaller and resources are focused on bang for buck.
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immibis 3y ago
Wait, Unity owned WETA FREAKING DIGITAL? My goodness!

by dagmx 3y ago

Most notably, this is laying off their entire acquisition of Weta Digital which was an audacious $1.6B purchase. After which Unity did nothing to take the proposed products into the marketplace.

nithayakumar 3y ago

Just Weta FX - those were the guys and gals that used Weta tooling for producing films and such. Not Weta Tools - those are the guys and gals building and maintaining the Weta tools

qwytw 3y ago
But it seems that 265 is pretty much the entire headcount of Weta Digital’s 'tools department' they have acquired back in 2021? From their announcement: "Unity welcomes Weta Digital’s world-class engineering talent of 275 engineers that are known for architecting, building, and maintaining Weta Digital tools and core pipeline." So it just seems they have just thrown away $1.6 billion. If they were unable to commercialize any of their tools while they still had the people who built them it will be entirely hopeless now.

bhouston 3y ago

I think they were not easily commercialized. I was a VFX software developer and internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. VFX devs are not the usual product guys, they are usually either R&D/math guys or hackers, with little in between. The way to commercialize WETA stuff would be to make new product teams and basically redo much of the work with professional software devs and figure out where the original VFX R&D had gaps - and it always has massive gaps. Unity just went nuts with wacky acquisitions the last couple years and this was one of them.

Narann 3y ago
> internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. HT: That’s also an important point explained when we talk about internal VS commercial (or build VS buy) in the animation/VFX industry. Internal softwares does less than 5% (or less) of commercial products, but they are doing it in a straight, fab compatibility way. No effort is made in making the tool working with your fab, the tool is shaped for the fab from scratch. That’s the value of internal tools. Converting those is viable product is very risky.
MrScruff 3y ago
Yeah, you could see this outcome a mile away. While there are examples of in-house VFX software being commercialised (eg. most of the Foundry's offerings) it's generally not built to the same spec as commercial software. There are plenty of good developers but the teams are smaller and resources are focused on bang for buck.
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immibis 3y ago

Wait, Unity owned WETA FREAKING DIGITAL? My goodness!