> its a cool Visual FX studio not a technology company..
Weta develops metric tones of tech internally, including employing some of the top graphics researchers at various points in their careers. There is tons of tech talent in VFX and animation shops. Hell, I work with libraries open sourced by Pixar as part of my day job at a FAANG.
It’s currently tied for 1 with their other usual suspects in US News [1]. Of course these rankings are all a bit arbitrary, game-able, and should be taken skeptically :)
It’s certainly not East Coast, but it’s very North East - the rust belt spans well beyond the Midwest. Even culturally Pittsburgh feels like it has more in common with, say, Buffalo or other North Eastern rust belt cities than Wisconsin or Minnesota.
> There are plenty FAANG engineers minted from the top Midwestern schools - think CMU and other state schools - even if they rank behind the top schools on the coasts.
CMU is a private school, ranked number 1 in CS, and is not in a Midwestern state! That said, there are lots of top CS programs in the Midwest.
Very cool! Just the other day I was trying to set Blender’s camera based on a standard 3x4 computer vision KRT matrix, and it is surprisingly a pain in the ass —- I wish more of these graphics CAD packages (Blender, Houdini, Maya) made it easier to deal with vision data.
Very cool! Glad to see Nucleus still getting some love, Jos would be happy — I was talking to a Pixar effects fellow at SIGGRAPH and was under the impression that Houdini’s constraint solver thing had spread like wildfire in that department.
Autodesk is doubling down on CAD and engineering (their leadership has even said so publicly) — VFX and animation is just a much smaller market. I personally think this is very short sighted.
Autodesk laid off the entire R&D staff of Maya (outside of Bifrost, which was an acquisition a few years ago and is now a one person show, mainly) and transferred ownership to their maintenance engineering division, if that isn’t life support I don’t know what is.
> Autodesk tools (especially Maya) are way too expensive in what they deliver. I'm glad many big studios realized this in that they either build their own tools (Pixar/Dreamworks) or they adapt Open Source (Blender) and help improving it.
Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support. Pixar is paying hundreds of software engineers in the Bay to develop their proprietary animation tools, which is most definitely not cheaper than a few hundred Maya seats per show.
I don’t think Pixar’s Maya-like software ‘man v’ runs on macOS, at least it didn’t a couple of years ago (my ex was a TD at Pixar and used to complain about the old version of Linux they were on). I’m pretty sure the demos they showed were of their file format viewer which is a separate thing.
Film 3D is mostly Linux at this point. All the major VFX shops (like Weta) and animation studios (Disney, Pixar, etc) are on Linux for artist workstations. Apple stuff gets lots of use, but mainly iPads for story boarding and such.
Depends where you live! I’m in Pittsburgh and there is still a culture here of bailing to the well heeled suburbs (cough cough Fox Chapel) when having kids. You couldn’t pay me to leave the city core, but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.
I love these types of breakdowns! It would be really cool to see breakdowns in other portions of a game engine, too: physics, character animation, managing the massive assets, lots of potential goodies.
It would be really cool if someone web-assemblied the best of class game system emulators and exposed them all through a uniform web interface. All vintage game consoles accessible through a single site!
I never said San Francisco was safer than NYC, but even looking at those statistics they are mostly comparable in terms of violent crimes (notice that I did say your car is much more likely to get burgled in San Francisco), and the rate of aggravated assault is higher in that study in NYC. My point is that that both San Francisco and NYC are by and large safe cities by American city standards.
Weta develops metric tones of tech internally, including employing some of the top graphics researchers at various points in their careers. There is tons of tech talent in VFX and animation shops. Hell, I work with libraries open sourced by Pixar as part of my day job at a FAANG.