a blog of links related to computer animation and production technology Sponsored by ReelMatters.com
Year: 2023
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Why every game developer is mad with Unity right now, explained
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unitys-self-combustion-engine-this-week-in-business
$1.3 billion – Unity’s lifetime accumulated deficit as of December 31, 2021. Unity has never had a profitable quarter in its history. It has posted modest operating profits in the past three quarters for the first time ever,
Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers. It was successful in doing that because it’s very hard for a sustainable business to compete against one that is fine losing billions of dollars.
First, you make yourself essential to the market, even if it costs you billions to get there. Then once you hit a threshold – let’s say, I don’t know, 70% of the market – you lean into the enshittification process. You charge more for your services, you give your customers worse terms, you turn the heat up slowly and continuously, confident in the knowledge that people are so locked in to your business and have so few viable alternatives that they may grumble but they will ultimately put up with it.
And it’s such a common strategy in so many industries today that there’s just no sense of horror or outrage from the onlookers. Industry watchers and Serious Business People have seen this play out so many times they just acknowledge it’s happening and treat it as if it’s a perfectly cool and normal thing and not illegal predatory pricing.
I think this new Runtime Fee makes perfect sense from a mile-high point of view, if you think about Unity as a business where you just turn whichever dials and pull whatever levers will make the numbers go up the most.
The only problem is it makes no sense at all if you instead think about Unity as a game development tool that game developers should want to use.
https://www.pcgamer.com/why-every-game-developer-is-mad-right-now-explained
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
“The uproar is primarily driven by two factors: Unity is attaching a flat per-install fees to games that use its engine, and it’s arbitrarily scrapping existing deals and making the changes retroactive.
The policy announced yesterday will see a “Runtime Fee” charged to games that surpass certain installation and revenue thresholds. For Unity Personal, the free engine that many beginning and small indie developers use, those thresholds are $200,000 earned over the previous 12 months, and 200,000 installs; one those marks are met, developers will be charged 20 cents every time someone installs their game.
Another big issue is that Unity has made this change retroactive: It supersedes any existing agreements with Unity that developers may have made, and it applies to games that were released even before any of this happened. The revenue threshold will be based on sales after January 1, 2024, when the new pricing system takes effect, but sales that occurred before that date will count toward the install threshold.
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Unity bosses sold stock days before development fees announcement, raising eyebrows
Unity executives sold thousands of shares in the weeks leading up to last night’s hugely controversial announcement it will soon charge developers when one of their games is downloaded.
Behind the scenes, CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, as noted by Yahoo Finance, which noted this move was part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none.
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DNEG announces pay cuts of up to 25% and artists’ repayment loans
EDIT 20230919
Revised Proposal: Initially met with backlash, DNEG has revised its proposal over the weekend. They’ve introduced a third option that focuses on reducing work hours instead of salaries, along with additional paid leave to compensate for the income reduction.
- A salary reduction of 20% to 25% for seven months, with paid leave to compensate.
- A temporary 50% salary reduction, supplemented by a company loan, totalling 90% of the original salary, repayable over three years.
- Reduced working hours to a 3-day week for seven months, with no hourly rate reduction.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/avuuk_animation-visualeffects-dneg-activity-7107674426275442688-Fd1d
Today, we want to address a concerning development at DNEG. They very recently announced pay cuts of up to 25% for its employees, coupled with a rather unconventional approach to compensate for these losses through ‘loans’, which their staff need to repay overtime.
As of now, DNEG is imposing these pay cuts for a period of 7 months. To ‘help’ offset the financial impact on their staff, the company is offering ‘loans’ to their employees. While offering financial support during challenging times is usually commendable, the repayment terms are causing deep concern within the Animation & Visual Effects community, especially around their legality.
The loan offered by DNEG comes with a significant catch: employees are required to pay back the loan over a three-year period. This means that even after the pay cuts are reinstated, employees will be obligated to allocate a portion of their salaries to repay the company. Aledgedly, there is no interest on the loan (tbc). This approach has sparked a considerable backlash within our industry.
We at the Animation & Visual Effects Union voice very strong concern and opposition to the pay cuts, as well as the loan method. We believe pay cuts should not be compensated through loans with long-term repayment plans, placing a heavy burden on the employees who are already facing financial challenges.
This situation underscores the importance of open dialogue and collaboration between employers and employees during challenging times. While businesses often need to make tough decisions to navigate economic uncertainties, it’s crucial to strike a balance that doesn’t disproportionately impact the livelihoods of their dedicated workforce.
What can be done about this?
If you are a member of the Animation & Visual Effects Union, get in touch with us immediately and do not accept any pay cuts yet. You can email your BECTU official Stefan Vassalos stefan.vassalos@prospect.org.uk to get advice and organise with your colleagues at DNEG.
Remember, you MUST give your consent for a paycut. It is ILLEGAL to impose a cut without it. You DO NOT have to consent to a pay cut. Legal action can and will be taken against paycuts without consent. Anyone affected please get in touch with us immediately so we can represent and protect you and your livlihood as much as possible. BECTU has the power and resources to challenge moments like this, so it is imperitive YOU take action and contact us. Talk to your colleagues and get in touch. It is only through solidarity and collective effort that we can address these challenges and shape a brighter future for our industry.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and insights on this matter. Your input and perspective are valuable as we navigate these unprecedented times together.
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Unity Presents New “Runtime Fees” Based on Game Installs and Revenue
https://80.lv/articles/unity-presents-new-fees-based-on-game-installs-and-revenue/
The new program is called the Unity Runtime Fee and the main principle is based on how often users install games. Unity thinks “an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share”.
This is bound to kill all developers who count on free downloads but profitable venues of income like in-app purchase. Which count for a vast majority of the 30% of the market that Unity holds onto.
The extra bill will be estimated by Unity based on non-specific data.
Unity does not have a ‘known’ way to track installs. Likely due to privacy laws. Thus they will need to ‘estimate’ installs and bill clients based on that. … …. Data which is aggregated with no identifying features isn’t really prevented. Unity’s claim that they can’t distinguish between an install and reinstall or even a paid versus pirated copy actually reinforces the idea that they aren’t using any identifying information, so it would be compliant to privacy laws. … Assumption is that they will get some data from distributors like AppStore, GooglePlay, Valve, Sony, Microsoft, etc… and estimate from there.
“It hurts because we didn’t agree to this. We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren’t told this was going to happen. We weren’t warned. We weren’t consulted,” explained the Facepunch Studios founder. “We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity’s engine. We’ve paid them every year. And now they changed the rules.”
“It’s our fault. All of our faults. We sleepwalked into it. We had a ton of warnings,” they added. “We should have been pressing the eject button when Unity IPO’d in 2020. Every single thing they’ve done since then has been the exact opposite of what was good for the engine.
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VFX Pros Expose The Hidden Costs of Marketing Selling a Movie as “Real” and Underselling Digital Work
Visual effects make the impossible possible and thrill audiences, but the artists who toil over delicate and groundbreaking work don’t always get to take a bow—or in some cases, even acknowledge the existence of their work.
The source adds that sometimes there’s a blatant directive that “there will be no discussion of VFX. … We don’t want to overshadow the actors [or] we don’t want to break the mythology that somebody did all of these stunts.”
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BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) in Ray Tracing
Bounding volume hierarchies are used to support several operations on sets of geometric objects efficiently, such as in collision detection and ray tracing. A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects, which form the leaf nodes of the tree, are wrapped in bounding volumes.
BVHs are often used in ray tracing to eliminate potential intersection candidates within a scene by omitting geometric objects located in bounding volumes which are not intersected by the current ray. BVH is a crucial component in ray tracing rendering engines like Arnold, as it helps accelerate ray intersection tests and reduce resource costs.
Users do not have control over RAM consumption of the BVH. Here are some tips to optimize Arnold renders when BVH is the bottleneck:
Optimize Your Scene Geometry. Simplify or optimize your 3D models and scene geometry. Complex geometry can lead to larger BVH structures and longer BVH build times. Consider using LODs (Level of Detail) or proxy objects for distant geometry to reduce the BVH complexity.
Use Arnold Stand-ins and Proxies. Arnold Stand-ins and proxies allow you to load complex geometry only when needed, reducing the BVH complexity during the initial BVH build. This can be particularly useful for scenes with a lot of high-poly assets.
Denoising. Applying denoising to your final render can help reduce the number of rays required and consequently, the BVH intersection tests.
Render in Layers. If your scene has many elements, consider rendering it in layers. This allows you to optimize each layer individually, potentially reducing BVH build times.
Distribute Rendering. If you have access to a render farm or multiple machines, distribute the rendering workload. This can significantly reduce rendering time as each machine can handle a portion of the BVH calculations.
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Why VFX workers are unionising in Hollywood — and why it’s important
https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a44936059/vfx-workers-unionising-hollywood/
Last March, IATSE released a damning survey that showed how visual effects workers lack access to essential benefits, such as health insurance and retirement plans.
It also found VFX crews are lacking breaks and rest periods, and they’re not getting paid for working overtime, resulting in some workers failing to even make minimum wage.
This survey was aimed to organise VFX workers, one of the last areas of the production community that are still not unionised. Given the worsening of their working conditions while their craft is increasingly in demand within the industry, seeking protection has become a necessity.
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Antonio de Curtis, Totò On life as an Artist
I’m very lonely: not terribly lonely. Because I love being alone. I need to be alone: to contemplate, to think. Sometimes even the people I love bother me: my daughter, my wife. And when it happens, quietly, I get up and go to my room. Yes, it’s difficult to live with me: this is a reproach that my mates have always addressed to me, and that Franca also addressed to me at the beginning. Now Franca has become accustomed to it, she finds this life normal even though she is very young.
I understood it, you know? I understood that she would like to go to places, to nightclubs. But I don’t like it, I never have. When I see that false amusement, I can’t help but think that behind each of those people there is a drama: the pianist perhaps has broken shoes, the industrialist has bills that are due, the hostess has her son. sick… I told them: I am a misanthrope, the basis of my life is the house.
The house, for me, is a fortress, almost a person. When I enter I always greet you like a person: “Good evening, home.” Today, for example, Franca is in Lugano and I am alone at home. Well: I’m fine with it.
Antonio de Curtis, Totò
Original version
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CamP: Camera Preconditioning for NERF (Neural Radiance Fields)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.10902.pdf
“…any errors in the camera position solve can dramatically reduce the quality of a reconstruction. “
“Introducing CamP — a method to precondition camera optimization for NeRFs to significantly improve quality. With CamP we’re able to create high quality reconstructions even when input poses are bad.
CamP is a general purpose trick that you can apply in many places. Apply CamP to prior SOTA NeRF models like Zip-NeRF, and you improve quality and establish a new SOTA. Applying CamP to existing camera optimization models, like SCNeRF, to improve their performance.” – Keunhong Park(a) ARKit Poses (w/o COLMAP) (b) ARKit Poses + CamP (Ours) -
Workers at Vancouver’s WildBrain animation studio look to unionize
“…workers are concerned about issues such as scheduling, base pay, and the rising cost of living in Vancouver.
They are also seeking ways to address “the precarity (insecurity) that’s really baked into the industry,” Gladman told CBC’s The Early Edition on Wednesday.
“People are working really short-term contracts, sometimes weeks at a time,” he said. “You go to work on Friday. You’re not sure if you’ll have a job on Monday. I think workers are just tired of holding the bag when things slow down every time.”
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Sono molto solo: non terribilmente solo. Perché io amo esser solo. Ho bisogno di essere solo: per contemplare, per pensare. A volte mi danno noia perfino le persone che amo: mia figlia, mia moglie. E, quando accade, zitto zitto, mi alzo e vado in camera mia. Sì, è difficile viver con me: questo è un rimprovero che le mie compagne mi hanno sempre rivolto, che all’ inizio mi rivolgeva anche Franca. Ora Franca vi si è assuefatta, trova questa vita normale sebbene sia giovanissima.
La capivo, sa? Capivo che le sarebbe piaciuto andare nei posti, nei night. Ma a me non piace, non è mai piaciuto. Io, quando vedo quel divertimento falso non posso fare a meno di pensare che dietro a ciascuna di quelle persone v’è un dramma: il pianista magari ha le scarpe rotte, l’industriale ha le cambiali che scadono, l’entraineuse ha il figlio ammalato… Gliel’ho detto: sono un misantropo, la base della mia vita è la casa.
La casa, per me, è una fortezza, quasi una persona. Quando vi entro la saluto sempre come una persona: «Buonasera, casa». Oggi, per esempio, Franca è a Lugano e in casa son solo. Be’: ci sto benissimo.
Antonio de Curtis, Totò