Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "Unity Acquiring Weta Digital: A Breakdown" video.

  1. As it happens, i have some relevant experience. 10 years ago, i was a developer on a commercial 3D engine - at the time, it was slowly failing as a game engine, we were shipping some WiiWare and XBLA shovelware, but for all intents and purposes, Unity was eating our lunch. Before Unity came about, we had the most popular indie and small-scale game engine in the region, with some AAA-ish successes. With just a couple exceptions. One, is that we have carved out a niche in virtual studio, that is all these news and weather and all kinds of TV broadcasts which were filmed against a bluescreen, so they had camera tracking, realtime compositing, and the studio would be assembled and rendered in a game engine. I didn't think this trend ever looked good or was good and as it happens, now it's dead, the virtual studios have been gone for 5 years. The second was the CG movie previsualisation. The problem is, when you're filming a movie against blue/greenscreen, where do you put the camera, what will actually be in the shot once the post production team is done with it? Previs doesn't have to look entirely photorealistic, but it has to be all the right things in the right place and it has to respond to lighting, and it solves that problem. On-set previs with camera tracking will allow the DP and director to see on a screen an adequate approximation of what they're aiming towards, on set. So that was our second hope to survive, and we were well equipped, given existing camera tracking partnership and TV foothold and the technical traits that we offered. Unfortunately, a lot of other companies also recognised the need, it was actually a massive push at the time, Crytek was actually the only big game engine players represented in this area directly, and they had a lot going for them, like A LOT, others had some sort of ad hoc tech specialised for the purpose, bound more closely to industry animation software, or were built also on top of existing game engines. What's happening now is that Unreal is eating everyone's lunch, it's digging hard under Unity on all fronts. Indie devs are also gradually less interested in Unity, and well you have mentioned The Mandalorian yourself. What Unity needs is a foothold and some industry expertise to enter this industry. If they can get at least one major studio not going Unreal, they have at least some hope in this industry. There appear to have been a number of what i might describe as panic acquisitions by Unity just to make sure Epic/Unreal doesn't get there first. Also it is a little funny to hear a company where core engineering on their namesake product is from Denmark and is assembled from European devs first and foremost to be described as "American" but that's the world we live in, i guess.
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