It's hard to appreciate that there is a vast difference between hitting walls in a tank and not caring about the exterior, and slamming into a wall on a bicycle.
charitably asserting that you are right in the sense that it can be found. I'm a vfx compositor turned devops crossover. The tooling at this point is decades old, in concept. There are many "reimagining"s of vfx pipelines with Unreal at its core, but even these pipes have flame/nuke/fusion somewhere downstream.
Even smaller than the unreal operators is the pool of users that are purists enough to try and keep it all in-box.
Maya, Nuke, Houdini. These are the kings of the vfx world you were looking for if youre talking in the tens of thousands of artists out there, using pipelines that are conceptually 20 years in the making in some parts. The switch from Shake to Nuke was ~15 years ago and theres _still_ nothing good enough to replace it. Foundry scrapes as much money from us as possible because its a good product.
Unreal is amazing. Our shop is wrapping a project using it as the lighting pipeline, delivering to a Nuke team.
That sounds interesting! How come? Been doing devops stuff for a few years by now but also have some background in the Unity/HCI space which I enjoyed a lot. I'd be curious how this combination might be applicable in the VFX/media production industry.
I've also been on the fence of learning Unreal for a while now. Maybe you could shoot me an email (address is in my bio)? I'd be very interested in how the industry works outside the 'classic' VFX artist space.
Mainly because in 2019 I was offered an opportunity to be the "tech guy" for a small startup and you know how those go. Since I was alone it just became a DevOps/dev/helpdesk role over time.
Nature does select for laziness. The laziest state that can outpace entropy in diverse ways? Ideal selection.