Unity Announces Intent to Acquire Weta Digital

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Acquisition to put award-winning VFX tools and technology into the hands of millions of creators and artists.

Today we have announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Weta Digital, specifically its award-winning engineering talent and artist pipeline, tools and technology. Ultimately, this acquisition is designed to put Weta’s incredibly exclusive and sophisticated visual effects tools into the hands of millions of creators and artists around the world, and once integrated onto the Unity platform, enable the next generation of RT3D creativity and shape the future of the metaverse.

Weta Digital will join Unity’s Create Solutions focused on the continual evolution of their dozens of proprietary graphics and VFX tools, such as Manuka, Lumberjack, Loki, Squid, Barbershop, HighDef, CityBuilder, and many more. In the future, with our deep expertise in real-time, these world-class artist tools will be available to creators through an accessible cloud-based workflow. The Academy Award-Winning VFX teams of Weta Digital will continue as a standalone entity known as Weta FX and is expected to become Unity’s largest customer in the Media and Entertainment space.

“The Weta Digital tools created unlimited possibilities for us to bring to life the worlds and creatures that originally lived in our imaginations,” said Peter Jackson, Chairman & Co-Founder, Weta Digital. “Together, Unity and Weta Digital can create a pathway for any artist, from any industry, to be able to leverage these incredibly creative and powerful tools. Offering aspiring creatives access to Weta Digital’s technology will be nothing short of game changing and Unity is just the company to bring this vision to life.” “We are thrilled to democratize these industry-leading tools and bring the genius of Peter Jackson and Weta’s amazing engineering talent to life for artists everywhere,” said John Riccitiello, President and Chief Executive Officer, Unity. “By combining the power of Unity and Weta Digital, the tools and technology that built characters and scenes from the world’s most iconic films such as Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and Wonder Woman, will enable an entirely new generation of creators to build, transform, and distribute stunning RT3D content.” Weta Digital is the premier creator of VFX, delivering high-quality, ultra-realistic characters, objects, and scenes for a wide variety of award-winning movies and television shows, such as Avatar, Black Widow, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, The Suicide Squad, and more. Weta Digital achieves this superior level of performance with a world-class team of VFX artists and engineers, who helped build an extremely sophisticated artist pipeline and set of tools to conduct advanced facial capture and manipulation, anatomical modeling, advance simulation and deformation of objects in movement, procedural hair and fur modeling, and many more techniques that have been galvanized, developed, and perfected through hundreds of properties across thousands of shots for more than 20 years.

“When you realize that Unity is exceptional at delivering world-class tools and technology to creators, this acquisition is a perfect match: we have the opportunity to get Weta Digital’s award-winning, high-end artist pipeline and tools, which are in a class by themselves, to a much broader audience of artists than what has been historically possible,” said Prem Akkaraju, CEO of Weta Digital. “Weta’s goal has always been to inspire and motivate a whole new generation of creators and it’s exciting to pass the mantle over to Unity. I see a future where more and more content shares the same level of visual fidelity as Avatar and Game of Thrones and Unity is the ideal company to lead us into this future.”

With this transaction, Unity will acquire:

  • Weta’s world-class engineering talent of 275 engineers that are known for architecting, building and maintaining Weta Digital tools and core pipeline;
  • Dozens of industry-leading tools such as Manuka, Gazebo, Barbershop, Lumberjack, Loki, Squid, Koru and more, all integrated seamlessly into Weta’s industrial strength production pipeline;
  • A foundational data platform for interoperable 3D art creation, making it easy for hundreds of artists to work seamlessly together; and
  • A library of thousands of incredible assets that the Weta FX team will continue to accumulate as they create world class VFX in the years to come.

Feel free to discuss and ask questions in the thread!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygAsQxDtXic

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Sounds like a great set of tools to rival Unreals set of utils and Quixel Library. However I am afraid I wont be able to afford any of this. My biggest curiosity is the pricing of the non-cloud things like assets and motion capture tools. Can we expect part of the tools being integrated into Unity to update the current tools like Terrain Editor, Path-Tracing and alike?

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Hey hey! So, for pricing, we are not yet sharing pricing or timing. Our intention, however, is to provide these tools at price points accessible to a wide range of creators.

These assets and tools will be separate from the Unity Editor, so that creators are able to use them in their existing toolchains. Our plans include building a great user experience with an integrated workflow for customers who use these tools with the Unity Editor.

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Pretty sure many of the users share the same concern. Unity has track record of acquiring companies with cool tech but still pricing that tech out of reach of average engine user. It’s kind of hard to get excited when you can pretty much assume the new acquisition won’t benefit you in any way. I get it’s business as usual though.

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Would be great if (wishful thinking):

  1. Asset library is free for use with Unity projects.
  2. Different pricing points are suited for any customer, from individuals to biggest companies.
  3. Source content is processed and available for wide range of target platforms (different LODs of models, resolution of textures etc.)
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Right now weta seems very focused on films.

Integrating the asset library with Speedtree sounds good.

Hopefully those 275 engineers can speed up development of Unity’s new terrain system.

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I would love to hear about how this impacts roadmaps for current tools being created (Sequences, Live Capture, etc). The tools sound fantastic for high end production… but I can imagine overly complex for smaller players (including hobbiests like me!) to use, even if affordable. Understanding what parts of existing tools may go away can help with planning on projects.

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Almost Unity users dont use it to make movies, this tools really not means a great change and possibly will be not free, while HDRP have realtime GI (not actual precalculate) high quality (movie quality) assets have not sense for cost reasons.

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Interesting but I wonder how many of these tools are optimized for real-time.

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I would like to be able to bake explosions and the like using VFX and weta dynamics. To texture sheets, and have motion vectors as standard.

Lovely acquisition, please don’t leave poor indies behind though :slight_smile:

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Congratulations Unity!
I’ve been a diehard Unity user for years. Specifically, I’ve been using Unity for animation and film for a few years now. This news is really really exciting! Thank you! As I’m sure many people are… I’m looking forward to what comes next…

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This is awesome news!!!

But pretty useless news for most of us also.

If it’s getting integrated, then great. But pretty sure its not and it will be just another Reflect, MARS, ArtEngine, Pixyz.
You do realise as film makers and story tellers, we’re not going to be paying these rediculous fees, but simply switch to Unreal, where software is free for filmaking.

If you’re the size of Weta, ILM and the likes, you can afford a gazzillion different tools, but for most of us we’re 10 people or less and budgets are not unlimited.

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First thought: W.T.F.

While the acquisition sounds interesting, I highly doubt any benefit for lambda Unity users within the next 4-5 years.

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I think it’s good news :smile:

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(I did not make this meme, so full credits to whoever did. It’s awesome.)

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Many tools but one of the most important a 3D painter is not in the pack, Weta Mari 3D is now a Foundry product.

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As much as I would like seeing those marvelous tools available “For all creators”, most likely they will be available only under Unity Pro. “All creators” means all of us : ) Literally ^ ^;

It’s big news all those tools will be there. Please also think in “All creators” that are indie. Indie plans or learning licenses could also be a good thing, right? :wink:

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Wil this affect the core Unity editor in any way? Or is the plan to keep it all completely separate?

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The proliferation of advanced technology is always a good thing, but a few questions from a game developer:

  1. I have a gamer graphics card (rtx 3070) and I know a lot of studios are accustomed to workstation cards. Will the technology in any way be accommodating the vast majority of indie game developers with consumer-grade cards? Say I wanted use that weta magic to see some advanced ai procedural animated horse muscles as it gallops in a scene. Will I get slow frame rates or long waiting periods when I’m testing out some animation?

  2. what’s the game plan when it comes to learning weta? Is it a very straightforward user experience where a newbie can easily figure out the software, or will there be a steep learning curve that would require a lot of research. i quickly searched weta tutorial on youtube and didn’t get good results.

  3. is this is going to be an open innovation ecosystem? will there be plans on user-created content/add-on for weta in the unity asset store? any notable asset developers who are planning on integrating or adapting their templates/toolkits/assets to work well with/compliment weta?

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I create offline cinematics to compliment our training apps developed in Unity so this welcome news. I just hope you make these assets free or very affordable like Unreal has with their assets.

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I honestly see no drawback in providing these tools under the similar pro/plus/personal conditions the Unity license itself has, because clearly there is no harm in letting personal users use these tools for free. Their projects may become successful and at that point they will need to pay once their company turnover reaches a certain threshold. As for pro users, they’d have to be in whatever plan Unity has for Weta content that’s far beyond mortals :slight_smile:

But plus and personal? let them at it. Let them beta test.

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