From The Lord of the Rings to Avatar, through Black Widow and the new saga of The Planet of the Apes. There are dozens of films for which Weta Digital by Peter Jackson he took care of the special effects in CGI. And now Unity Technologies decided to buy Weta Digital’s technology division for 1.625 billion dollars, to prepare for the metaverso which is talked about more and more often.
Unity buys Weta Digital, Peter Jackson’s special effects company
Co-founded by the director who brought Middle-earth to theaters in 1993, Weta Digital is one of the most important VFX studios to the world. Now its technology division, including art tools and the most talented engineers, go to Unity for $ 1.625 billion. The team for special effects VFX and for animation will form a different company called WetaFX, in which Jackson will continue to hold a majority stake.
But Unity has bought all the technologies developed in these nearly thirty years by the company. Like the tools for facial animation that we have seen on Gollum and Thanos, the possibility of create digital cities view in Alita and much more.
These tools will be available as subscription cloud services. But later on they will end up inside the Unity Engine, allowing anyone who uses the platform to make good use of it. Whether it is to create incredibly realistic video games or for the 3D models that will inhabit the metaverse.
“Weta Digital’s tools and incredible scientists and engineers will accelerate our mission to give content creators easy-to-use, high-performance tools to bring their visions to life. Whatever the metaverse is ora o in the future, we believe it will be built by content creators, just like you, ”he says in a Unity post.
For all cinema lovers, with the arrival of Weta Digital the prospect of a metaverse immediately becomes more tempting. How it will be implemented remains to be seen. Are you curious?