I wrote a blog about some of my experiences at the then-new MIT Media Lab in 1985. Unlike the experience of the author, I was more of a lone late-night hacker (in the old sense of the word).
Perhaps I'm viewing the past through rose-colored glasses, but I wish there were such efforts at innovation in the computer field today. Maybe the last attempt at doing something truly different was the Connection Machine.
I hope for the sake of my former colleagues at Weta that those transferred to Unity can simply be transferred back to Weta.
The point of production pipelines being bespoke (at least past a certain company size) is a relevant one. The main workhorses of large scale production (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc.) are extremely customizable and extensible. Over years (decades in the case of Weta) companies develop highly complex workflows and associated tools based on these applications.
That is why the Unity deal never really made sense to me. The idea that Weta's tools could somehow be packaged up and delivered as essentially shrink-wrapped consumer-level add-ons to Unity was a naive one at best. I'm not entirely surprised to see it fall apart.
"Vulkan represents a low-level way of talking to the GPU more or less on the GPU's terms. As opposed to OpenGL which is a way of talking to the GPU on boomer CAD programmers' terms."
Kind of like that description. I've been doing GL since before it was OpenGL.
In my Common Lisp 3D system [1], I've been happily using very simple immediate mode OpenGL calls, taking advantage of CAD-like features such as drawing wireframes of various thickness over shaded polygons. OpenGL provides specific Z-buffer API calls to facilitate such things.
Is there a simple way of doing such CAD-centric things in Vulkan?
I developed my first 3D graphics system on a Symbolics back in the mid-80's, before Symbolics released their S-Geometry package.
Though the software was powerful and made use of the extensibility provided by Lisp, it failed to gain much traction in the industry because the hardware was not suited to 3D graphics. Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations took that market by the early 90's.
The Symbolics Lisp Machine S-Geometry 3D modeler from the mid 1980's was based on the winged-edge structure. It was the best polygonal modeler of its time, and the package lives on in philosophy as the Wings3D open source modeler.