New Weta Digital Unit....

[ambient-whisper]

sounds great, especially if the focus is on creating artist friendly solutions. i wonder if this will be used to also sell software ( like pixars renderman studio ), or if this will be mainly for weta purposes.

[Glacierise]

I guess that will be for their internal use only, rarely any tools come out of movie studios :) Frantic is the exception of course :)

[ambient-whisper]

i dont know all of the specifics, but werent tools like the ones below developed majorly for production at specific houses? now all of these are available for purchase.

nuke, digital domain
renderman, pixar/ilm
syflex, wasnt really developed at squaresoft, but it was based on similar tech that was developed on FF.
massive, at weta
( im not sure about shake, but i remember reading that a ton of its development happened at weta )
project messiah was an in house tool as well.
lots of tools from blur ( like the XSI tools for example )


granted not all of these were sponsored directly BY the production houses. some were built for production houses by certain individuals who held the rights to the software ( like massive )

again, im not 100% sure about details, but i think i got the basic idea right :D

so, id love to see some of the stuff that weta will be working on, eventually for purchase.

on another note, even though i dont use max, wouldnt it be great if blizzard released their max tools?! i am not sure how much they still rely on max for production and how deeply they converted into maya now for cinematics, but if they dropped max entirely ( except for modelling?! ) then it would be cool to see them release those tools without support.

[JakeJK]

Also Luma released ther great (and artist friendly) Nexus shader :).. http://www.luma-pictures.com/nexus/index.htm


It looks really interesting and I hope it will be available for the public as well. Weta got a lot of crazy talented people.

[earlyworm]

... rarely any tools come out of movie studios :) Frantic is the exception of course :)

And Pixar, Digital Domain, Rising Sun Pictures to name a few more. Either directly or indirectly quite a lot of tools and techniques used at big VFX studios make their way into the broader spectrum of the CG industry.

I can think of quite a few tools that once required a custom in-house solution which are now stock standard as part of any major 3D application.


i wonder if this will be used to also sell software ( like pixars renderman studio ), or if this will be mainly for weta purposes.


It's sound more like they're setting up a R&D group rather than a commercial software group. So I think we're more likely to see published papers at Siggraph than we'll see software for sale.

[Aneks]

( im not sure about shake, but i remember reading that a ton of its development happened at weta )
Shake owes a lot to Imageworks not WETA.

Open exr which I think is HUGE comes with thanks from ILM
Animal Logic wrote Mayaman, Softman, Maxman etc.

Lots of pieces of big apps come from big shops, think Maya cloth, hair.

Mudbox is from Weta originally.
Keylight from framestore CFC
Cineon (which is probably before most people's time) from Cinesite.

There is a huge history of this all over the industry.

[earlyworm]

They could have come up with a better name through... :)


Weta Advanced Research Group And Magic Engineering School
Weta Labs (a nod to the Muppet Labs - the logo could have included some characters from 'Meet The Feebles')
Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Fx

The Napoleon Wang Research Foundation

[Laa-Yosh]

on another note, even though i dont use max, wouldnt it be great if blizzard released their max tools?! i am not sure how much they still rely on max for production and how deeply they converted into maya now for cinematics, but if they dropped max entirely ( except for modelling?! ) then it would be cool to see them release those tools without support.

John Burnett still has some of the stuff online at www.footools.com and some stuff may be taken offline, although they're probably obsolete anyway.
You could try web.archive.org though... ;)

[thatoneguy]

Blur has released tons of their tools. It's called BlurBeta. (Not to be confused with Blur Beta). :D


Blur Beta is bucket full of scripts they used. BlurBeta is a huge chunk of their pipeline. They've also released their Max-Python script.

[grahamef]

Animal Logic wrote Mayaman, Softman, Maxman etc.

And Eddie. Good ol' Eddie.

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