How This 3D Software Changed Character Animation Forever | Ziva VFX

They should have just made it open source, rather than selling to another company, that way, everyone would have been able to use it.

The EA Corporate management of Unity is one of the reasons I chose Unreal instead along time ago. Notice how companies that Epic bought are still usable to non Unreal Engine customers or free to use for Unreal Engine customers. I thought Unity was trying to compete with that business model, lol.

Unity really screwed a lot of stuff up. Next you can cover the train wreck of those Weta tools that were going to come out that Unity bought without knowing wth to do with them.

Better than an Oscar. I would watch them.

if Unity could just release a good demo with Ziva, instead of the horrendous to look at garbage they released, people would have paid more attention to it. don't know if it was a factor in any way, but the demo of the floating head girl talking, was HORRENDOUS

Nice video!

Sad, but luckily now there is Adonis by Inbibo!

a arte é sensacional

You can do a lot of this in Maya already using Maya Muscle, but it's much slower with more limitations. Originally written by Mike Comet(Comet Muscle) and entirely in MEL, it was bought by Autodesk years ago and rewritten in Python but conceptually it's the same. Build bones, then muscles, then use a combination of different types of skinweights, including sims. I think the heaviness of a lot of this process is why some vfx studios will chose a pose-driven morphs/blendshapes approach instead, despite it being less realistic. Unity likely made the purchase as a response to what EPIC was doing with Metahumans and the introduction of more realistic muscle simulations in Unreal. While it's all really cool tech, indie studios likely won't use it much as the time resources required to rig up a single custom creature/character would be a lot more time than what a typical rigging pipeline in games is used to.

I think Unity is on a bit of a misguided path, and while I understand that they need to meet the expectations of their shareholders and users, I think they're using a strategy that bypasses the essentials. As others have pointed out, they seem to be focusing more on cosmetic things rather than providing the features and conveniences that game development really needs. In the case of Ziva, I haven't tried it, but I know it was more convenient to use than Houdini for muscle simulation. If Ziva becomes difficult to use, I think I'll have to use ML Deformer, which is powered by machine learning in Unreal using Houdini. I know Houdini's muscle simulation is pretty good, but like other Houdini tools, it has a steep learning curve and very little learning resources and compact documentation. :( Good deformation, and automation of that deformation, seems to be a secondary use in console games and high quality animation, but I think the increased ease of use and applicability will help a lot in creating compelling animations and character movement.

Nice

I've always thought that the best way to have a faster way of doing character modeling is a rig based modeling apptoch. you have a character worksheet, you develop the rig accourdingly, and then you model the character with the rig parts inmind. in this way, you can even have somewhat automated appraoch that can (at least in theory) speed up the modeling process.

Now Ziva is gone, what can we do for muscle/bone/fat simulation?

WOW

Good muscle system is already there with all other best studios like MPC , Framestore , many building there own So unity is just needed money .. sold one part of it … Unity don’t care about passion creation and retention etc …

Nice tool even though muscle simulation on cg industry is way older than ziva...

Dick Walsh won an Academy Sci-Tech Award for the muscle based facial animation system on Shrek. His muscle based system was initially developed for Batman & Robin back in the early 90's

Clarisse and now Ziva :(

If DNEG acquired the license for the ZIVA IP then no one else like MPC who have been already using it can no longer use it anymore?

Is a plugging for maya. Now Houdini has muscles, jiggle, chops, collision and sliding muscles Integrated so no meed for add ons