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Unity Weta Tools

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Re: Unity Weta Tools

#41

Post by forrestthewoods »

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…

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..."

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#42

Post by raincole »

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 :)".

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#43

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#44

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tomilola39 wrote: post #4
amanzi wrote: post #3

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

How so?

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#45

Post by GoofballJones »

troupo wrote: post #39
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.

"...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).

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#46

Post by FoodWThrow »

GoofballJones wrote: post #45
troupo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"...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 everythin…

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#47

Post by dandellion »

troupo wrote: post #39
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.

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#48

Post by troupo »

GoofballJones wrote: post #45
troupo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"...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 everythin…

> 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

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#50

Post by mschuster91 »

troupo wrote: post #48
GoofballJones wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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 everythin…

> 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 c…

> 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.

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