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Unity Weta Tools

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Re: Unity Weta Tools

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#62
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 sp…

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is an accelerated solution team that uses the engine.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#65
post #54
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…

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#66
post #65
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#67
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I worked on Gazebo in its early days.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, p…

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-Matc…

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.

Re: Unity Weta Tools

#70
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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)…

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.
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