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Unity Weta Tools

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Re: Unity Weta Tools

#31

Post by markus_zhang »

kaveh808 wrote: post #21
Pathogen-David wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adva…

Clicked profile and saw MIT math and the rest. That's impressive.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#32

Post by pfranz »

ryanlitalien wrote: post #17
Kyrio wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#33

Post by peteforde »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #27
peteforde wrote: post #26

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

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#34

Post by larusso »

readyplayernull wrote: post #5
kaveh808 wrote: post #2

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…

> 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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#36

Post by infintropy »

kelsolaar wrote: post #18
CyberDildonics wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#37

Post by kaveh808 »

readyplayernull wrote: post #24
kaveh808 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adva…

> 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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#38

Post by kaveh808 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #23
kaveh808 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adva…

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."

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#39

Post by troupo »

kaveh808 wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#40

Post by Jare »

kaveh808 wrote: post #38
forrestthewoods wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

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.
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