A new era of creativity
Unity recently acquired Wētā Digital’s industry-leading tools, pipeline, and engineering talent. With this comes a foundational data platform for interoperable 3D art creation and a thousands-strong library of assets that the WētāFX team will continue to evolve. Together, Unity and Wētā Digital’s 275 engineers will carry on architecting, building, and maintaining Wētā Digital tools and core pipeline, with plans to begin launching solutions for artists in 2023.
Wētā Digital’s Academy Award-Winning VFX teams will continue as a standalone entity known as WētāFX under the majority ownership by Sir Peter Jackson and helmed by CEO Prem Akkaraju.
Power, flexibility, and sophistication
Unity believes the world is a better place with more creators in it. That’s why Unity will bring Wētā’s state-of-the-art toolchain to artists everywhere, real-time enabled and in the cloud.
Barbershop is a suite of hair and fur creation and editing tools that supports the entire workflow, from growth to grooming. Use a combination of procedural and artist-guided tools to grow hair and fur, adjust growth patterns, and groom the final models. Advanced procedural tools support concepts such as braided hair, and the resulting models are simulation-ready to add realistic dynamics produced by wind and motion.
Clone
One of the most powerful features in Barbershop, this tool enables artists to reuse parts of an existing groom and stamp them elsewhere on the asset or even mirror whole sections onto another side.
Groom
Artists can use familiar grooming tools – brushes, combs, scissors, blow dryers – as well as purely digital tools for bending, clumping, and frizzing. The average human head has over 100,000 hairs, and this tool lets the artists edit every single one directly to create and modify any kind of hair or fur. An artist might create grooms for a single character’s hairstyle, eyebrows, mustache, and chest hair.
Merge
Another powerful aspect of Barbershop is complete mesh independence. Artists can transfer grooms from one typology to another without losing any work. Creators can also use existing grooms as starting points for new ones, drastically speeding up the grooming process by mixing and matching grooms together.
More Wētā Digital tools in action
Koru
Koru is an advanced puppet rigging system optimized for speed and multi-character performance. Using Koru, technical directors and developers can create constraints, rigs, deformers, and puppets to support high-performance animation, cloth simulation, and related applications.
Lumberjack
Lumberjack provides the core toolset for vegetation and includes modeling, editing, and deformation tools. Using Lumberjack, artists can author and edit plant topology, including animated geometry, as well as manage levels of detail, instancing, and variability among individual assets.
Citybuilder
Citybuilder tools support worldbuilding, layout, and set dressing, ranging from planetary- to small-scale scenes. Artists can procedurally create scenes with node graphs, place content programmatically, and manually adjust placement.
Other Unity Tools artists can use right now
From independent boutiques and indie studios to global media producers and AAA powerhouses, artists worldwide are using Unity’s art tools to speed up their creation pipelines.
ArtEngine
ArtEngine is Unity’s material authoring tool. Harnessing the power of assisted creation, it streamlines texturing and material production workflows.
SpeedTree
Bring your environments to life with the power of procedural modeling, flexible art tools, a living asset library, and cutting-edge photogrammetry workflows.
Animation tools
Harness the power of real-time rendering to accelerate production, smooth workflow hurdles, and grow creativity with Unity.
Ziva VFX
Bring your characters to life with physics-based character simulation software in Maya. Achieve the lifelike, coupled dynamics of muscles, fat, and skin, or any soft objects.