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Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

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Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#91

Post by Keyframe »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #40

What a joke I was there when the acquisition happened and it was both “yay” and “what?” There was so little communication with the overall staff - even at the M9 level - and the management seemed to be doing their own thing. My prediction: Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded

Series of events and PR releases sounds like ultimately they have paid for non-exclusive tools/IP source locense for 1.6b. WetaFX still has rights to continue tools and IP and judging by grapevine and PR they'll also hire a good bunch of devs back. Ridiculous

Biggest hardware tech in film business ARRI isn't worth third of that. That's how small all of that behind the scenes industry is.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#93

Post by Auracle »

xbar wrote: post #90
TruthWillHurt wrote: post #23

This actually a good move. Focus on games rather than attempt to compete in VFX sector. The Billion dollar acquisition was probably driven by megalomaniac ex-CEO, wanting a piece of every pie and world domination.

No. It was a company who saw Unreal turn the Star Wars property Mandalorian into a profitable success. Someone thought Unity+WETA would be competitive/compelling.

Well, it could have been, but they would actually need to work on both sides to make it work.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#94

Post by MakeThemMoney »

javajosh wrote: post #58
pmontra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond

what a sad story. It's an interesting tale oddly in favor of letting nepotism happen. The story definitely reads like some activist investors righteously decapitated the company for nepotism, but then were left with a dead body.

Is it really in favour of nepotism? I see nepotism in this case as incidental. They could have restructured the company for the lulz, and still get the same result.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#95

Post by shadowgovt »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #80
shadowgovt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major difference that is no longer a difference is that VFX used to be about creating visual imagery in the context of a forced perspective with live action shots mixed in. The dynamic background technology being used now for shows like The Mandalorian and Star Trek changed the story. Now VFX teams are being asked to craft the back half of a set as a 3D model that can be blended with live action shot in front of a…

The dynamic background technology being used now for shows like The Mandalorian and Star Trek changed the story This is still very niche compared to normal vfx shots. VFX shots are everywhere. So now they have to care about the 3D dynamics of the scene in a way they previously weren't required to What does "3D dyanmics of the scene" mean specifically? Any vfx shot with 3D needs to track the camera, find the ground pl…

I mean that a VFX artist working on a thin slice of the world (even with camera tracking, one isn't usually doing full VFX on a 360 or even 180-degree view) doesn't really have to worry too much about whether their scene makes volumetric sense beyond what the camera can see, nor do they have to model a physical space with its own physics going on everywhere in the background.

... but task them with creating a whole virtual set that links to the practical set and the actors are acting within, and now questions like the realism of the whole space, light sources that impact the real world, etc. come into play. Game engines have been modeling whole spaces that can be inhabited at any point in the space for ages longer than VFX tooling pipelined for post-production has.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#96

Post by muststopmyths »

shadowgovt wrote: post #82
tapoxi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can remove the NDA on the SDK but still require games to go through a strict quality control and approval process before allowing them to be sold. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

It's risky. Remember Tengen games on the old NES? Tengen chose not to play Nintendo's game, reverse engineered the protocol, and started manufacturing cartridges of their own games without Nintendo's consent. Nintendo tried several flavors of technological and legal obstacle to them doing this, but ultimately those failed. In the end, Nintendo combated the problem by establishing the Seal of Quality branding which, a…

I think it's more inertia than anything else at this point.

For example, the Xbox/Windows GDK allows you to basically target one codebase for both platforms (with minor differences). So developing an Xbox-competing console is a matter of shipping a GDK-compatible software platform. Maybe even using Proton on a linux-based console.

But that's just on the software level of course. The entire ecosystem of a console is hard to replace.

I would have said it's about preserving the price-point/entry-barrier of the devkits themselves, but they don't cost thousands of dollars as they used to either.

So, I think they do the NDA because that's the way it's always been done.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#98

Post by techdragon »

gmerc wrote: post #69
throwaway4aday wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, reading up on the timeline of events it really looks like he just blew a bunch of cash trying to copy Epic's moves and then tried to boost earnings with that insane pricing change. How can somebody fumble things that badly? Especially since his record with the company isn't all bad with him getting Unity involved with Oculus/Meta, although that was a very self-serving move since he was an early investor in Oculu…

He was the CEO of president Bioware/Pandemic as part of a VC group he led and was invested in, went to EA, bought the company for almost 1B, laid off the people at pandemic and ran EA into the ground to the point where they fired him.

Unity will either fire him or destroy themselves as a company… he’s not exactly a sharp and savvy businessman with the nuance to master the intricacies of where profits lie in a particular niche of a particular industry … he’s the replaceable cogs at desks make business widget units and if the profits per business widget don’t look good enough then you must do something… that kinda guy…

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#99

Post by CyberDildonics »

shadowgovt wrote: post #95
CyberDildonics wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dynamic background technology being used now for shows like The Mandalorian and Star Trek changed the story This is still very niche compared to normal vfx shots. VFX shots are everywhere. So now they have to care about the 3D dynamics of the scene in a way they previously weren't required to What does "3D dyanmics of the scene" mean specifically? Any vfx shot with 3D needs to track the camera, find the ground pl…

I mean that a VFX artist working on a thin slice of the world (even with camera tracking, one isn't usually doing full VFX on a 360 or even 180-degree view) doesn't really have to worry too much about whether their scene makes volumetric sense beyond what the camera can see, nor do they have to model a physical space with its own physics going on everywhere in the background. ... but task them with creating a whole v…

doesn't really have to worry too much about whether their scene makes volumetric sense beyond what the camera can see

This is absolutely not true. Typically there is lidar for an entire set and the camera and the set lidar need to fit together and make sense.

but task them with creating a whole virtual set that links to the practical set and the actors are acting within, and now questions like the realism of the whole space, light sources that impact the real world, etc. come into play.

This is what camera trackers do. Lights are done by the lighting department.

Game engines have been modeling whole spaces that can be inhabited at any point in the space for ages longer than VFX tooling pipelined for post-production has.

Photogrametry is 25-30 years old and virtual sets have been used for a very long time on green screens.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make at this point, but the things you're saying aren't true.

Don't mistake the attention that the virtual stage stuff gets as being the same as the use it gets. The enabling technology is the large high resolution screens more than anything and the point of using them is more about reflections, refraction and to a lesser extent hair and backlighting that are difficult to make work on green screens.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#100

Post by TillE »

georgeecollins wrote: post #65
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #40

What a joke I was there when the acquisition happened and it was both “yay” and “what?” There was so little communication with the overall staff - even at the M9 level - and the management seemed to be doing their own thing. My prediction: Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded

If the management continues to under perform, they will be acquired. The FTC investigation showed Zuckerberg was thinking about it. He probably couldn't for Sherman act reasons. But think about it: they have a good business that has better strategic value for a platform holder. Amazon spent a fortune trying to emulate their business to advantage AWS. That was an incredibly poorly managed endeavor. If they had bought…

I think Microsoft would love to own Unity. Many of their game studios use it, it's C# (with a promised migration from Unity's ancient hacked Mono to modern .NET), they don't have their own public game engine. It would probably be the best outcome for everyone.
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