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.
That sounds interesting! How come? Been doing devops stuff for a few years by now but also have some background in the Unity/HCI space which I enjoyed a lot. I'd be curious how this combination might be applicable in the VFX/media production industry.
I've also been on the fence of learning Unreal for a while now. Maybe you could shoot me an email (address is in my bio)? I'd be very interested in how the industry works outside the 'classic' VFX artist space.
I haven't heard of anyone using unreal for final frame rendering in film.
i.e. MPC had significant use of Unreal on set for mocap, Framestore has Unreal setup for previs and mocap (they hired some ex-games devs with Unreal experience to work on it)
ILM stagecraft is the 'hero' example (and as mentioned, they've got Helios now), but various studios are experimenting with it in various departments.
Disclaimer: I work for Weta, and above doesn't reflect anything about Weta (Gazebo, etc), it's all from friends/ex-colleagues at other studios...
