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.
It says "Contact us", which probably means tailored license and support, and feedback of bugs/wishes, from a few selected clients.
Epic not only develops Unreal, but also develops games and is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry.
Unity... Well.
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 specific topics, but after digging you often a function or component that is just the thing for your needs.
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.
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).
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.
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
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 don't know how accessible or useful these will be to most game devs using Unity (apart from maybe Speedtree).
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 advantage of new higher levels of abstraction for producing computer animation.
Interested in knowing more :)
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.
Heck, even NerdForge used Unreal to create their virtual window on their new set. https://youtu.be/Vg1TGADF248?t=880
So instead, fwiw, anecdote: I work for a film production company and we ingest assets all the time from high end VFX houses. It's always from Unreal / used in Unreal in my experience. That's in LA/ Hollywood and high end productions. For all I know they use a lot of Unity in Bollywood or Europe.
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.
I haven't heard of anyone using unreal for final frame rendering in film.
