Unity Weta Tools (opens in new tab)

That is precisely how Unity works already. Yes they have the forums etc. But what gets into a fix release and even if a breaking change gets promoted to an LTS version is decided by big corp license agreement.

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 find it easier to adapt Unreal to a different genre than to figure out the best way to do anything in Unity.

"...is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry".

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).

I work at Unity. Everything’s either in late beta or ready for launch.

I think there is an opportunity to rethink a system for computer animation. Existing DCC packages are stuck in the late-80's mindset of animation consisting of interpolated values between keyframes. I wrote two such systems in that timeframe: Neo-Visuals and Softimage.

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.

One thing I would love to see is for Unity to catch up to Unreal when it comes to virtual studio applications. So far as I understand, there's no technical reason that people couldn't be tooling Unity to do the next Mandalorian.

Heck, even NerdForge used Unreal to create their virtual window on their new set. https://youtu.be/Vg1TGADF248?t=880

I know a lot of film studios actually use Unreal for animation and simulation these days, so I wonder if this is Unity trying to get in on that

Wētā: https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/9244

Weta: https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/45259

More importantly, why? While I get you wouldn't want to zalgo-ise the site or encourage the use of unicode emoji, stripping or preventing the use of diacritics seems like it's excluding a lot of languages.

I tried to find data but couldn't quickly, so maybe someone else can find a comparison study.

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.

Not to mention most of those use ILM Stagecraft which, despite being Unreal-based in its first version, has been using a custom engine for some time now.

Some animation studios use Unreal. Watching the credits of some anime, I sometimes see credits for "Unreal Engine Developers"

Unreal is used by all the major VFX vendors whether it be for virtual production, previz or final frame rendering.

Search YouTube for "Unreal" film previews. There are so many out there that were all realized with the Unreal engine. Maybe it's the algorithm, but all I see is stuff done in Unreal and I haven't seen anything done in Unity.