[kaveh808]

I worked at Weta prior to the Unity acquisition.

It will be a tremendous technical feat if they have managed to bring the deep functionality of what were Weta's internal tools to a more general audience of artists. The key difference will be that these artists won't have direct access to the developers who wrote the tools, as the Weta artists did.

Packaging powerful graphics tools within an artist-friendly interface and workflow is challenging.

[readyplayernull]

> a more general audience of artists

It says "Contact us", which probably means tailored license and support, and feedback of bugs/wishes, from a few selected clients.

[larusso]

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.

[troupo]

The problem with Unity is that they build or integrate tools they don't use themselves.

Epic not only develops Unreal, but also develops games and is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry.

Unity... Well.

[dandellion]

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.

[loupol]

Having also used both for several months each, I feel the same way overall.

I will say that Unity has better documentation and more learning resources due to the much bigger community around it, but I still found myself reimplementing several things that felt really basic on top of the various APIs.

Unreal's documentation can be really lackluster here and there and it can be difficult to find forum posts regarding specific topics, but after digging you often a function or component that is just the thing for your needs.

[dandellion]

I'll agree that Unity had more and better tutorials, especially for beginners. But I found myself using the reference documentation more than tutorials and I liked the engine and blueprints docs in Unreal better, but maybe that's just me.

[hnthrowaway0315]

I'd argue it's less of dog fooding issue, as Unity does use the engine and plenty of others use it too, than a badly organization issue.

For everything there are multiple immature solutions stuffed by different teams. This is clearly a sign of managers grabbing fiefdom nd no one from the top tries to control it.

[whywhywhywhy]

Unity doesn't really use Unity Engine, they don't ship a game with it or use it in the real world.

From what someone on HN has described before last time they showed something off like this, even if it's made internally at Unity it isn't really made with the tools you get downloading Unity yourself, it's made by an offshoot team who has people doing changes to the internals of the engine and writing custom hacks for this one use case. Then they ship the video, be it Adam (2016) or Enemies (2022) but then that's it, they go on to work on something else and the tweaks and tooling never get made into something viable for the main engine.

That's why Unity themselves managed to ship Adam [1] 7 years ago but since no one else has used Unity to create content like that since. Feels like it's almost to a yearly schedule now where Unity will do a PR demo like the link above on this topic and then nothing real ever materializes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA

[hnthrowaway0315]

There is an accelerated solution team that uses the engine.

[jncfhnb]

That’s the best thing about unreal blueprints. They have excellent discoverability of the engine api

[GoofballJones]

"...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).

[FoodWThrow]

Unity acquired Weta; Epic collaborated with movies themselves, to the point that their CTO even played as an extra in the latest Matrix movie. I think that is the distinction they were going for here.

Currently, Weta is an outsider. Even internally, the acquisition had raised eyebrows among the trenches. The decision was criticized quite a bit by game developers using Unity as well. Unity itself is also somewhat troubled direction wise; their biggest product is a game engine, but their biggest revenue source is ads. They merged with an ad company recently, and purchased a movie VFX studio. They seem ready to pivot to whatever tech trend that they can catch.

> With your "Unity... Well.", what did you mean? Weta and and Unity aren't doing this?

I would say that "Epic is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry," while Unity isn't. Weta may be established in the movie industry, but the Weta Unity bought is the tool division, not the VFX division. Weta tools is also an acquisition, and does not create waves throughout Unity like how movie production make waves inside Epic. It is the difference between an acquisition to compete, and a vision to expand.

[qwytw]

> biggest revenue source is ads

I don't think that's true if we group all the subscription, "strategic partnership" and other engine related revenue together but yeah, but Ads is about half.

To be fair it might not be that bad because there isn't that much revenue to gain from engine sales, especially using a subscription model (though I don't think royalties are bringing that much revenue for Epic either..). Unity is quite expensive if you're a hobyist, indie or just use it occasionally but it's dirt cheap if you're a mobile ad-filled P2W shovelware developer. IAP is monopolized by Apple/Google so Ads allows Unity to get a bit larger bite of the pie compared to the pittance (compared to overall revenue games made with it make) they get by directly selling the engine.

[troupo]

> With your "Unity... Well.", what did you mean?

Weta was an entity of its own for longer than Unity as a company has been around. Unity bought them (well, the tech assets) as a reaction to Epic moving into and firmly setting up shop in the film business.

I mean, Mandalorean had already shot season one with Epic's tech before Unity woke up and decided/realised that it's being left behind [1].

Unity is a game engine company that hasn't produced a single game, moving into film making tools by never producing, and only acquiring, film making tools as a reaction to competition. Competition is good, but is Unity a company that can actually compete in this space? I hope so, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[1]

Epic already boasting about it in early 2020 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/forging-new-paths-fo...

Unity announcing aquisition in late 2021 https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital

[qwytw]

>Unity is a game engine company that hasn't produced a single game, moving into film making tools by never producing

To be fair this isn't that different from Adobe or Autodesk for instance. Aren't most professional tools, middleware etc. like that?

Historically game engines seem to have been an aberration in that regard since they were almost exclusively built in house and they sometimes made available to third parties with very limited commercial success in almost all cases.

[mschuster91]

> Unity is a game engine company that hasn't produced a single game, moving into film making tools by never producing, and only acquiring, film making tools as a reaction to competition.

In a gold rush, the one selling the shovels is usually the one making the most profit.

[Applejinx]

That in no way suggests they're the one designing the best new sort of shovel.

[firtoz]

I worked at Unity prior to the Weta acquisition.

If the button says "contact us" or they ask for a waitlist, they haven't actually built or prepared much for release and are gauging for interest before likely starting to take engineering etc action on it.

Caveat: things may have changed a bit after my time.

[timoni]

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

[toxicFork]

I confirm that timoni does work at Unity, I'd trust their word.