Unity Weta Tools

[kaveh808]

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 and workflow is challenging.

[readyplayernull]

> 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.

[troupo]

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.

[firtoz]

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.

[CreepGin]

Had to read the youtube comments to understand a little what this is about. So it seems to be a suite of tools (Ziva, Speedtree, SyncSketch, Parsec, Eddy, Deep Comp) that's separate from the Unity Editor and aimed towards (film?) artists.

I don't know how accessible or useful these will be to most game devs using Unity (apart from maybe Speedtree).

[Pathogen-David]

They aren't really targeting gamedevs here. Both Unity and Unreal have been trying to win over Hollywood for a while now.

[kelsolaar]

Ziva has runtimes in Unity and Unreal Engine.

[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 :)".

[ydruts]

Not really a new concept that a company wants to diversify and do more than one thing? The people working on Weta Tools are not the same people working on the engine.

[peteforde]

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.

[squeaky-clean]

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.

[amanzi]

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

[striking]

HN strips lots of Unicode stuff from titles.

[tomilola39]

How so?

[thrillgore]

Given how quickly Unreal has taken the (already taxed) VFX space by storm, they are desperately trying to catch up.

[CyberDildonics]

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.

[mkoubaa]

This seems to be the shop that developed the loki physics simulation interface. I'm looking for that and don't see it here, just seems like they're throwing that brand name around for general purpose animation tools.

[DeathArrow]

So, this is Unity's equivalent of 3D Max and Maya?