So one interesting thing to note here, is that it appears that it was a licensing deal. Weta proper still appears to have access to thier tooling, and is isolated from unity pulling out.
The Foundry, who are a VFX based version of Adobe/Autodesk have a similar style of working, but not at such a massivly inflated scale. They negotiate license agreements to take over tools from VFX companies and extend them for sale to others. (nuke, is from Digital Domain, Mari from Weta, Katana & Flix from sony) However they never spaffed 1.6billion for a complete pipeline.
Partly because they could never raise that much cash, the market isn't anywhere big enough to support that, but also VFX pipelines are incredibly bespoke and mostly ephemeral. I'm willing to bet that most of the stuff Unity bought was glue code for getting assets in and out of off the shelf software. The rest is managing billions of versions of individual files. (Weta people, please jump in and correct me)
Sure there are special bits of rnd that allow procedural generation, or better marker->3d model tracking, but not 1.6 billion and 250 people. The "tooling" team of weta original was never more than 60 people from what I understand.
I hope for the sake of my former colleagues at Weta that those transferred to Unity can simply be transferred back to Weta.
The point of production pipelines being bespoke (at least past a certain company size) is a relevant one. The main workhorses of large scale production (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc.) are extremely customizable and extensible. Over years (decades in the case of Weta) companies develop highly complex workflows and associated tools based on these applications.
That is why the Unity deal never really made sense to me. The idea that Weta's tools could somehow be packaged up and delivered as essentially shrink-wrapped consumer-level add-ons to Unity was a naive one at best. I'm not entirely surprised to see it fall apart.
The Foundry, who are a VFX based version of Adobe/Autodesk have a similar style of working, but not at such a massivly inflated scale. They negotiate license agreements to take over tools from VFX companies and extend them for sale to others. (nuke, is from Digital Domain, Mari from Weta, Katana & Flix from sony) However they never spaffed 1.6billion for a complete pipeline.
Partly because they could never raise that much cash, the market isn't anywhere big enough to support that, but also VFX pipelines are incredibly bespoke and mostly ephemeral. I'm willing to bet that most of the stuff Unity bought was glue code for getting assets in and out of off the shelf software. The rest is managing billions of versions of individual files. (Weta people, please jump in and correct me)
Sure there are special bits of rnd that allow procedural generation, or better marker->3d model tracking, but not 1.6 billion and 250 people. The "tooling" team of weta original was never more than 60 people from what I understand.