Unity is making some Weta 3D tools available to all VFX artists

Unity is releasing some of the specialist 2D and 3D tools from Weta FX — the visual effects company behind Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and James Cameron’s Avatar movie franchises — to artists across the wider VFX industry under a new Unity Weta tools division. Unity revealed during its Siggraph 2023 keynote that some of Weta’s industry-leading compositing and character creation tools will be coming to its Unity real-time game development engine, almost two years after Unity acquired Weta’s VFX division back in 2021.

The Weta tools being released into public beta under the new division include add-ons for Wig 1.0 (used to create hair and fur in Autodesk Maya), Eddy 3.0 (used to process volumetric effects like smoke or fire in Nuke), and Deep Compositing (which adds depth to composition tools in Nuke). “Up to this point, these tools were part of a proprietary pipeline that only Weta had, and now they’re going to be accessible to everyone,” said Timoni West, vice president of Unity Weta Tools, to The Verge.

For context, many large studios across the film and gaming industries have created specialist, proprietary tools to help develop their projects. A few famous examples are the RenderMan 3D rendering engine software Pixar used to create Toy Story or the award-winning toolset Weta used to simulate water for Avatar: Way of the Water. “These are tools that have been battle-tested — they’ve been used in productions before, so all we have to do is make sure that it’s available to more people so they can speed up their productions as well,” added West.

Unity is also placing some updated versions of its existing apps under the Unity Weta Tools suite, like Ziva (used to animate soft tissue like human faces or moving animals) and SpeedTree (used to create trees and other environmental foliage). Unity hopes that having access to these tools will help other studios speed up production timelines and produce higher-quality results. The inclusion of Wig software is notable, for example, because Weta is one of the best effect houses for simulating hair and fur in computer graphics, as can be seen in award-winning movies like King Kong (2005) and The Jungle Book (2016).

“We decided to invest in this because we see how people are trying to create these world-class movies and video games with smaller and smaller teams,” said West. “I think Everything Everywhere All At Once is a great example — they had just a tiny little team. And that it was an incredible movie, they did a fantastic job, but that’s the kind of film that could have been even better if they had had our tools, and they’d have been able to do it again more efficiently, easily, or quickly.”

Unity’s Engine has been adopted by several industries beyond game development, including VR, animation, movie effects, automotive, and architecture, so there are plenty of studios that will be able to make good use of these tools. The company has made other efforts to make 3D production more accessible across the industry, having recently joined the Alliance for OpenUSD’s push to standardize 3D content.