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[IbizaPocholo]

Unity Acquires Ziva Dynamics for Realistic Humans

Unity Technologies acquires Ziva Dynamics, to bring ultra realistic humans and creatures to games using machine learning and biomechanics.

gamerant.com

In an announcement posted this week, Unity Technologies announced the acquisition of Ziva Dynamics, in what could simplify the creation of realistic human characters for Unity developers. Ziva Dynamics claims to use a combination of machine learning, deep learning, and biomechanics to deliver realistic, deformable characters in real-time. The announcement included a video of Emma, a simulated person used as a tech demo for Ziva’s technologies. Apart from humans, the system can also be used for clothes, animals, and other deformable materials which require complex simulation. Unity is promising the effects work well in both realistic and stylized games, and render in real-time on consumer-grade hardware thanks to ZivaRT.

Canadian-based Ziva Dynamics was founded in 2015 by James Jacobs and Dr. Jernej Barbic. Its technologies have been used in AAA games like Hellblade 2 and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. But it’s Ziva’s flagship software, ZivaVFX, which has been used in some major projects on the big screen, including Game of Thrones, John Wick 3, and Venom.

Presently, Ziva’s pricing structure appears unchanged for developers who want to purchase their tools. In the announcement, Unity claimed it wants to make it “easier, faster, and cheaper to have artists and all creators realize their visions” and seeks to “democratize" Ziva's toolset. Hopefully this will mean the technologies seen in Ziva’s products will be accessible in the Unity engine in the short future. This would be particularly helpful for smaller studios and indie teams who might not have the resources to invest in high fidelity VFX solutions.

 

[SlimeGooGoo]

.

 

[Con-Z-epT]

Unity porn game developers, rejoice

For better "lipsync"...

 

[Bo_Hazem]

 

[GymWolf]

Thanks for the nightmares.

That thing looks creepier and more unnatural than some scens with ellie in tlou2 tbh.

The fidelity may be higher but it is uncanny valley galore.

Also she look like that ugly secretary in mad men.

 

[CamHostage]

Interesting. Ziva has been making a name for itself in the machine-learning animation world, it makes sense somebody would snap them up.

FYI for the thread, Ziva's ZivaRT does make great faces like that, but it's also been core to some breakthroughs in character animation recently. When Spider-Man gained realistic muscle movement in the PS5 versions of Spider-Man Miles Morales, that was this tech which was used to train the animation system. And then when Ninja Theory needed to create a realistic 40ft Troll character who lumbered and stumbled about with tremendous weight and a struggle to move about in the world, that was Ziva too.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2: It Took 1 Month for Artists to Create That 40ft Film-Quality Troll

Ninja Theory and Ziva Dynamics reveal just how much work went into creating that impressive troll for Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 gameplay debut.

mp1st.com

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Unity Acquires Ziva Dynamics for Realistic Humans

Unity Technologies acquires Ziva Dynamics, to bring ultra realistic humans and creatures to games using machine learning and biomechanics.

gamerant.com

In an announcement posted this week, Unity Technologies announced the acquisition of Ziva Dynamics, in what could simplify the creation of realistic human characters for Unity developers. Ziva Dynamics claims to use a combination of machine learning, deep learning, and biomechanics to deliver realistic, deformable characters in real-time. The announcement included a video of Emma, a simulated person used as a tech demo for Ziva’s technologies. Apart from humans, the system can also be used for clothes, animals, and other deformable materials which require complex simulation. Unity is promising the effects work well in both realistic and stylized games, and render in real-time on consumer-grade hardware thanks to ZivaRT.

Canadian-based Ziva Dynamics was founded in 2015 by James Jacobs and Dr. Jernej Barbic. Its technologies have been used in AAA games like Hellblade 2 and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. But it’s Ziva’s flagship software, ZivaVFX, which has been used in some major projects on the big screen, including Game of Thrones, John Wick 3, and Venom.

Presently, Ziva’s pricing structure appears unchanged for developers who want to purchase their tools. In the announcement, Unity claimed it wants to make it “easier, faster, and cheaper to have artists and all creators realize their visions” and seeks to “democratize" Ziva's toolset. Hopefully this will mean the technologies seen in Ziva’s products will be accessible in the Unity engine in the short future. This would be particularly helpful for smaller studios and indie teams who might not have the resources to invest in high fidelity VFX solutions.

Looks ultra gamey to me. Looks nowhere close to realistic. And the model almost never blinks.

Although outdated, I still think the facial animations and mouth movements of LA Noire are the best. An that game came out 10 years ago! Whatever mocap they did was awesome.

Too bad their tech wasnt improved upon to modern specs.

 

[IbizaPocholo]

Looks ultra gamey to me. Looks nowhere close to realistic. And the model almost never blinks.

Although outdated, I still think the facial animations and mouth movements of LA Noire are the best. An that game came out 10 years ago! Whatever mocap they did was awesome.

Too bad their tech wasnt improved upon to modern specs.

 

[CamHostage]

Looks ultra gamey to me. Looks nowhere close to realistic. And the model almost never blinks.

Although outdated, I still think the facial animations and mouth movements of LA Noire are the best. An that game came out 10 years ago! Whatever mocap they did was awesome.

Well, yeah, LA Noire looks real because it was real. They wrapped video around a basic 3D head (sort of similar to the ghost heads in the Haunted Mansion ride; previously the PS2 game Siren did something similar, but with still shots and short sequential-image captures instead of video.) You can sometimes see the flat faces (though I do think they have some moving geometry underneath, not just a mannequin head,) and when the remaster came out, there were sometimes bugs with the video playback on certain graphic cards.

It was an intriguing and innovative solution to facial animation, but ultimately, it's a dead road because it's not real geometry. The characters can only move how the video moves. They can only exist in the lighting that the video was shot/processed for. They must all blend back into a first-position blank frame so that the next video can start. (Plus, it's expensive and limited in production.) It's a nice trick, and maybe it's good enough for many cases, but it's not a "real" character existing fully in the world. At some point, when personality-accurate synthesized voices come in and more animation routines are applied to the complete body in motion (a character catching different weights with grunts and expressions appropriate for how heavy the object, for example,) the video approach would never be able to catch up.

And in any case, Face RT is just one part of the ZivaFX toolkit. Check out their muscle ML system, where a character is rigged and trained to move inside-out the way a real flesh-and-bone-and-muscle body would. By defining its musculature, the computer can come to understand how different creatures would move, from a standard human (or even a super human ala Spidey) to a quadruped horse or cat (with different routines depending on the type of gait) to an unusual creature like a T-rex or a massive Troll monster.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/senua%E2%80%99s-saga-hellblade-2-it-took-1-month-for-artists-to-create-that-40ft-film-quality-troll.1625831/page-2#post-265211618

 

[CamHostage]

(*Necro-bump, but I didn't see this posted elsewhere, and I wanted a relevant place to post this...)

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKK!!!

Official word of this went out two weeks ago, but it's been kind of known that a lot of Unity's extracurriculars were in trouble since their reformation after the catastrophic billing charges announcement and other bad Unity news. This is unfortunately one of the dominos to fall.

This does not mean the end for Ziva Dynamics' cool Muscle VFX and Face Trainer and other technology, necessarily. Feature Film/TV effects company DNEG has acquired the exclusive license to use Ziva's deprecated tech, and has hired on a "significant portion" of the Ziva staff to continue similar developments. DNEG has worked on big films, including Dune 2, Godzilla X King, and, er, The Garfield Movie. However, DNEG does not, as far as I can tell, have any active work in games (thus my pffft at them for Garfield.) They did form a new division called IXP this year specifically for clients involved in "the worlds of gaming, virtual concerts, and theme park ride experiences", but none of the game clients are named and it all seems rather fledgling so far.

Developers who use Ziva (including Insomniac and Ninja Theory) will apparently still have an active license for 5 years and I guess some level of support, but developers jealous of Spider-Man's muscles or Senua's angry massive troll foe will have to find another provider (ideally DNEG IXP, if all transitions over smoothly) for their 4D-scanned ML-trained characters.

DNEG acquires exclusive license to Ziva Technologies from Unity - DNEG

DNEG acquires exclusive license to Ziva Technologies from Unity, a best-in-class toolset for the creation of digital characters and creatures.

www.dneg.com

VFX House DNEG Acquires Exclusive License to Ziva Technologies From Unity

VFX house DNEG has acquired the exclusive license to Ziva from Unity.

variety.com

 

[Jinzo Prime]

Developers who use Ziva (including Insomniac and Ninja Theory) will apparently still have an active license for 5 years and I guess some level of support, but developers jealous of Spider-Man's muscles or Senua's angry massive troll foe will have to find another provider (ideally DNEG IXP, if all transitions over smoothly) for their 4D-scanned ML-trained characters.

The differences between the comments in those theads is quite staggering, even though it's the same tech.

 

[CamHostage]

The differences between the comments in those theads is quite staggering, even though it's the same tech.

Ha! To be fair, the headline for Hellblade leads to doom. It sounds like something is wrong if it takes 30 days to do 1 character. (Also, Hellblade 2 is/was a way-long-in-development worrywell, whereas Spider-Man's PS5 muscles just showed up as an enhancement one day. )

But that's serious work in that month ,
(and it couldn't have been done in that time previously without Ziva systems, ) and also, it's a hell of a character.

Both threads go bad a few times, I'm interesting ways, but in either case, I don't think people really understood then (or now, for most of us, but the demos have gotten cooler ) what this was accomplishing.

 

[StueyDuck]

All of that so that western devs can turn women into bolrus the annihilator

 

[Barakov]

(*Necro-bump, but I didn't see this posted elsewhere, and I wanted a relevant place to post this...)

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKK!!!

Official word of this went out two weeks ago, but it's been kind of known that a lot of Unity's extracurriculars were in trouble since their reformation after the catastrophic billing charges announcement and other bad Unity news. This is unfortunately one of the dominos to fall.

This does not mean the end for Ziva Dynamics' cool Muscle VFX and Face Trainer and other technology, necessarily. Feature Film/TV effects company DNEG has acquired the exclusive license to use Ziva's deprecated tech, and has hired on a "significant portion" of the Ziva staff to continue similar developments. DNEG has worked on big films, including Dune 2, Godzilla X King, and, er, The Garfield Movie. However, DNEG does not, as far as I can tell, have any active work in games (thus my pffft at them for Garfield.) They did form a new division called IXP this year specifically for clients involved in "the worlds of gaming, virtual concerts, and theme park ride experiences", but none of the game clients are named and it all seems rather fledgling so far.

Developers who use Ziva (including Insomniac and Ninja Theory) will apparently still have an active license for 5 years and I guess some level of support, but developers jealous of Spider-Man's muscles or Senua's angry massive troll foe will have to find another provider (ideally DNEG IXP, if all transitions over smoothly) for their 4D-scanned ML-trained characters.

DNEG acquires exclusive license to Ziva Technologies from Unity - DNEG

DNEG acquires exclusive license to Ziva Technologies from Unity, a best-in-class toolset for the creation of digital characters and creatures.

www.dneg.com

VFX House DNEG Acquires Exclusive License to Ziva Technologies From Unity

VFX house DNEG has acquired the exclusive license to Ziva from Unity.

variety.com

The less fugly trainers western devs have at their disposal the better.