Cool, more things that are barely tangentially related to gamedev and have pricing structures that put them out of reach of most people using the engine.
I see some very exciting tech here for game dev. I have not looked at the pricing but I hope there will a tier for everyone.
I’ve not seen anything. Basically I’ve clicked through the video, and it is all trying to bedazzle the viewer, throwing dust in one’s eyes.
The demo reel could’ve taken insane amount of time to produce, for example.
How about something practical. Say they start with unrigged character an make a movie. In a hour. That would be interesting.
The reel looks like it is part of some huge technology stack that has no connection whatsoever to me.
TBH I wasnt clear from the video what the tools do… Lots of film clips, some throwing in a premade background, but, like @neginfinity said, if you want to wow people show an example from scratch, even if there is a bit of timelaps and jiggery pokery. But From this, I couldnt tell you what they tools do, and I doubt us hobbiests will get to use most of it
Another sizzle reel just out
Isn’t that mostly Ziva, and not Weta? This Ziva tooling is available right now but most creators are priced out of it. It’s the territory of AAA and Hollywood.
Its effectively a repackaging and rebranding of the Weta Tools now that Unity has acquired them.
Yet to see the workflow for using any of these in the Unity Editor/Game Engine; so I think they are more likely just for separate film pipelines. Id rather have liked them to spend the $1.625 billion on the industries Unity excels at instead (Games, Mobile, VR/AR, etc) and improve those existing tools that majority of Unity users actually use daily.
Unity has been placing services like these into their Unity Industry package which is $4,950 per seat per year. If that’s what happens with this service too there won’t be a more affordable tier. It will be that tier or enterprise.
https://unity.com/products/unity-industry
https://store.unity.com/configure-plan/unity-industry
Any gamedev that is excited by any of these announcements is a fool.
We can get excited for the Weta tools when Unity gets these features and ease of use first:
man i wish we could opt in for old school ui like that. it is so much easier to identify everything. new UI is always so flat it is difficult to look at.
Pretty much all this stuff is the Ziva tools, which do not have accessible pricing.
Increasingly moving away from the Indie devs… This absolutely needs to be priced based on revenue of the customer/studios, not a flat rate. A dev who has never made a red cent should not pay a dime for this. It doesn’t hurt Unity that the indie dev has access to this tool when neither Unity or the dev have been paid yet. I would specify that anything involving servers and data storage from Unity would be an exception. Obviously that costs them and can cost a lot when given out for free.
I’m skeptical that a free version would help anyone, really. This type of production tool comes from a whole other world of money and man-power than most of us have access too. These look like the sort-of tools for the type of studio that can afford to pay 10 people for three months to do technical rigging on a single character.
If I had this, for example, I doubt if I’d be able to make any use of it at all because it’s like one piece of a puzzle that I don’t have the rest of the pieces to.
Sort of, sort of not. These things are specifically to help reduce workload a fair bit in those situations.
None of what Unity have been doing for the past 5 years have had any kind of indie focus. They’re too big of a company. Indies can’t sustain them. Even the biggest indie titles around bring in chump change of what boils down to a few pro licenses and an asset store purchase or two.
Thing is though, I’d wager that barely any money coming in is from companies doing Big Deal shit like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of sales are coming from things like licenses and ad revenue to mobile studios churning out energy based things like Rise of Nations and its ilk that themselves are massively supported by ads and IAP.
Their massive government military contract could benefit from some of this I presume. But yeah, their bread and butter is mobile as far as I’m aware. It’s just that per current capitalism/corpo handbook, a company must infinitely grow and expand in all vaguely viable directions to increase value for shareholders and enrichen CEO man and his merry band of money suits. Even if it’s not mandated legally, it’s still what corps do. Profit first, product second. Hence Hollywood type shit no one asked for.
Honestly? Nah. This is all pretty much aimed at high-end productions and film, both of which are things that Unity really only has some inroads in, which is why some of these things are also cross-compatible with Unreal, which people actually use in that context.