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),…