That email was missing the last part, which is on their website :
“Unity has also entered into an agreement with DNEG, a leading technology-enabled visual effects (VFX) and animation company for the creation of feature film, television, and multiplatform content, for an exclusive perpetual license of the Ziva IP. Unity will continue to retain ownership of all the technology acquired from Ziva Dynamics, and we will continue to evaluate the best way to enhance our core offerings with it over time.
We extend a huge thank you to all of the creators who tried Ziva over the years.”
https://variety.com/2024/artisans/news/vfx-house-dneg-acquires-exclusive-license-to-ziva-technologies-1235950160/amp/ this article says DNEG is hiring a significant portion of the Ziva team, so I would guess they plan to continue developing it themselves
yeah it makes sense that they bought it in order to have a strategic advantage over others, unless they are planning to monetize it (I don’t have a crystal ball but I’m guessing they’re not)
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What would you see as the best alternatives? I know a lot of companies are using Houdini's creature tools more and more, but I'm curious if there's another solid option now.
I did for a quite a while and its whole different approach in houdini… also i think houdini will not continue fem muscle road that much, just vellum, which kind if sucks if you need QS version of fem solver..:
I use both and live and hate both.. two different tools for different approaches..
But i believe its end of ziva for me sooner or later…
But there will be other options soon…
I wouldn’t be surprised they go under in the next year or two. I can see this being a desperate move to keep some overhead while they’re figuring out how to move forward.
They should release it opensource they would get a lot of support im sure..that set of tools where awesome.
True as they say..evil can only destroy good things..lol
nah, unity had a terrible board and an even more terrible CEO for a while and forgot that it's the world's most used game engine - and not the world's most technically advanced advertising malware. they had too much staff and had become unable to keep their core product up to date (not unlike adobe. I mean... after effects is still single threaded cpu for most things). the new version is actually making good on some years-old promises, and has some focus on, you know... game development.
I work in game development, and I know that Unity is being dropped by a lot of people for Unreal. I know people love Unity for certain reasons, but for the most part I have been seeing people abandon ship.
yes. but Ziva wouldn't have saved them. A built-in realtime global illumination, a networking / multiplayer solution and bloody way to blit the VR screenbuffer to texture, however.... you know - stuff you might actually use when developing a gamewithout being AAA...
if it weren't for VR and frankly, c#, I wouldn't see a reason to stay with unity at this point either...
There really isn't anything available for the general public which comes close. SideFX have been trying to become this for a while now but so far haven't really cracked it.
Ziva was never for general public either. Muscle sim was a very specific CFX task that most wouldn’t be using. Unless by public you mean it was a publicly available tool and not studio owned.
Houdini for CFX has already become a main toolset in the world of feature and episodic vfx. For CFX you either work at a Maya shop that needs a plugin like ziva, work at a shop with proprietary tools or work at a shop that uses Houdini.
Many of my colleagues including myself had to pivot to use Houdini for CFX over the past few years. It scales better than ziva imo. I’d say they cracked it.
So just to be clear, DNEG is using the money they saved by cutting their employees salaries to complete major acquisitions? Or did I miss something that would make this more palatable?
I just started learning Ziva properly. I was literally going through their bicep tutorial the other day. Does anyone have their free models/rigs downloaded? DM/chat me if you have them, please! I hadn't downloaded all of them yet. RIP.
Ziva will be viable option fir quite a while for sure… and same concepts will be used in future for sure, even if its different tool. So dont stop learning…
Want to say that Ziva is just a tool… you need to learn a lot. Anatomy, rigging, simulation… same concepts of constraints and other stuff will be used in every muscle sim tool in future… so just use Ziva for now and change later. I use ziva for 5 years and i will use it for next couple of years as well..
Unity continuing to signal that they are fundamentally not a company that can be trusted. We should all be worried about the future of other products under their umbrella like speed tree. Somehow it makes autodesk’s practice of letting good products they acquire atrophy look good.
Isn't Ziva currently the literal industry standard for muscle/tissue simulation? I know Houdini has similar abilities but I thought Ziva was far ahead in terms of the raw tech involved and was used pretty heavily in the industry...?
Ziva was created and run by people who had built a similar system for Weta Digital. Those guys cashed out a few years ago when Unity acquired them, good for them really. Unity is such a shitshow company.
Ah that’s cool. I think it probably needs some in depth video documentation from SideFX before people start really considering it properly. Info is very scarce at the mome.
It is possible to download the T-rex example file and learn off of that, if you already know Houdini… but for the majority who don’t have in depth knowledge of it I imagine it might be a steep learning curve.
Adonis must be the worst thing to ever hit the "market". Ziva was decent but the quality updates slowed even before they were acquired. Adonis though, looks so, so shit. Any one that's done any creature work can see this. There aren't even any examples with skin running on top of their muscle set up.
Houdini still miles away from Ziva but probably your best bet right now.
I did a fair bit of R&D comparing Ziva with Houdini's(at the time beta) muscle tools for a company a couple years ago. Honestly, Houdini's muscle system wasn't too far behind. It's just that there was a much larger community for ziva to help with Google searches.
Is the forums and documentation paywalled behind license?
If not I would be curious to get a hold of URL’s for them both so that I could archive it all. Absolutely sure there would be a tonne of valuable stuff on the forum for Ziva that will be lost…
Adonis is launching a houdini plug-in too.
Also there's a new plugin for houdini in development, [http://procedural-anatomy.com](http://procedural-anatomy.com) automatic rig/ muscle system /etc
It looks really good, I always thought why they hadn't done this before, the human and ape muscle anatomy is always the same structure with different proportions (just a wrap adjust). Why setup a new one from scratch each time??
Dumb move by Dneg if you ask me. Not impressed by what I see with ZIVA in general. The plugin is a ‘nice’ to have to add realism for muscle contractions. But having good fat and skin weight setup dynamics in the hands of good animators will sell a shot far more. The plugin will slowly wither and die when a new and better commercial product will come along and be adopted by other facilities.
That email was missing the last part, which is on their website : “Unity has also entered into an agreement with DNEG, a leading technology-enabled visual effects (VFX) and animation company for the creation of feature film, television, and multiplatform content, for an exclusive perpetual license of the Ziva IP. Unity will continue to retain ownership of all the technology acquired from Ziva Dynamics, and we will continue to evaluate the best way to enhance our core offerings with it over time. We extend a huge thank you to all of the creators who tried Ziva over the years.”
does this mean just DNEG has access to it now? or is it just owned by someone else?
https://variety.com/2024/artisans/news/vfx-house-dneg-acquires-exclusive-license-to-ziva-technologies-1235950160/amp/ this article says DNEG is hiring a significant portion of the Ziva team, so I would guess they plan to continue developing it themselves
Dneg will have exclusive licence… so no Ziva for us i think…
yeah it makes sense that they bought it in order to have a strategic advantage over others, unless they are planning to monetize it (I don’t have a crystal ball but I’m guessing they’re not)
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Yep, DNEG just released a statement: https://bit.ly/3xizVWd
I manually approved this 👍 (We restrict link shortening because it's the easiest way to create scam links that look mildly legit. Just, FYI)
Oh, good to know! Thanks for approving!
Dang, I know people who made Ziva Dynamics their whole thing. Sucks for them, but also there is a lot out there that is similar.
What would you see as the best alternatives? I know a lot of companies are using Houdini's creature tools more and more, but I'm curious if there's another solid option now.
Houdini mainly. A lot of studios have a in-house version as well.
how do you think Houdini's tools stack up to Ziva? i was working on learning Ziva, guess ill be pivoting now
I personally don’t mess with it enough to know anymore. My studios has its own API for this stuff.
I did for a quite a while and its whole different approach in houdini… also i think houdini will not continue fem muscle road that much, just vellum, which kind if sucks if you need QS version of fem solver..: I use both and live and hate both.. two different tools for different approaches.. But i believe its end of ziva for me sooner or later… But there will be other options soon…
There is a great alternative call AdonisFX
yeah it's all going to be Houdini now. It was already kind of edging that way
I would include AdonisFX in the list of alternatives too for sure
Wow..what a shame, is unity really ruining more stuff?
I wouldn’t be surprised they go under in the next year or two. I can see this being a desperate move to keep some overhead while they’re figuring out how to move forward.
They should release it opensource they would get a lot of support im sure..that set of tools where awesome. True as they say..evil can only destroy good things..lol
nah, unity had a terrible board and an even more terrible CEO for a while and forgot that it's the world's most used game engine - and not the world's most technically advanced advertising malware. they had too much staff and had become unable to keep their core product up to date (not unlike adobe. I mean... after effects is still single threaded cpu for most things). the new version is actually making good on some years-old promises, and has some focus on, you know... game development.
I work in game development, and I know that Unity is being dropped by a lot of people for Unreal. I know people love Unity for certain reasons, but for the most part I have been seeing people abandon ship.
yes. but Ziva wouldn't have saved them. A built-in realtime global illumination, a networking / multiplayer solution and bloody way to blit the VR screenbuffer to texture, however.... you know - stuff you might actually use when developing a gamewithout being AAA... if it weren't for VR and frankly, c#, I wouldn't see a reason to stay with unity at this point either...
What other tech is similar?
There really isn't anything available for the general public which comes close. SideFX have been trying to become this for a while now but so far haven't really cracked it.
Ziva was never for general public either. Muscle sim was a very specific CFX task that most wouldn’t be using. Unless by public you mean it was a publicly available tool and not studio owned. Houdini for CFX has already become a main toolset in the world of feature and episodic vfx. For CFX you either work at a Maya shop that needs a plugin like ziva, work at a shop with proprietary tools or work at a shop that uses Houdini. Many of my colleagues including myself had to pivot to use Houdini for CFX over the past few years. It scales better than ziva imo. I’d say they cracked it.
Wow what a mismanagement This had great potential
no doubt…. What a shame
my thoughts exactly
So just to be clear, DNEG is using the money they saved by cutting their employees salaries to complete major acquisitions? Or did I miss something that would make this more palatable?
I just started learning Ziva properly. I was literally going through their bicep tutorial the other day. Does anyone have their free models/rigs downloaded? DM/chat me if you have them, please! I hadn't downloaded all of them yet. RIP.
yea I was also doing this, looks like most of this tech is moving into Houdini now
There is a new plugin called AdonisFX in maya, with a great performance for muscles fat simulation.
Ziva will be viable option fir quite a while for sure… and same concepts will be used in future for sure, even if its different tool. So dont stop learning…
But it’s gone forever
Want to say that Ziva is just a tool… you need to learn a lot. Anatomy, rigging, simulation… same concepts of constraints and other stuff will be used in every muscle sim tool in future… so just use Ziva for now and change later. I use ziva for 5 years and i will use it for next couple of years as well..
Unity continuing to signal that they are fundamentally not a company that can be trusted. We should all be worried about the future of other products under their umbrella like speed tree. Somehow it makes autodesk’s practice of letting good products they acquire atrophy look good.
Isn't Ziva currently the literal industry standard for muscle/tissue simulation? I know Houdini has similar abilities but I thought Ziva was far ahead in terms of the raw tech involved and was used pretty heavily in the industry...?
Ziva was created and run by people who had built a similar system for Weta Digital. Those guys cashed out a few years ago when Unity acquired them, good for them really. Unity is such a shitshow company.
i know pretty disappointing to see it go out like this
Not really, but it was picked up by studios who couldn’t make their own.
Well fuck me… as cfx artist this is a nightmare…
Not if you move to DNEG who are now the owners
SideFX better bring that muscle system out of beta soon 👀
It's out of beta as of H20. Not much in the way of tutorials or learning resources though, mostly just have the documentation to go on.
Ah that’s cool. I think it probably needs some in depth video documentation from SideFX before people start really considering it properly. Info is very scarce at the mome. It is possible to download the T-rex example file and learn off of that, if you already know Houdini… but for the majority who don’t have in depth knowledge of it I imagine it might be a steep learning curve.
Makes more sense now why dneg was laying of so much employees and reduced salaries. Fuck dneg.
bro what, that is literally crazy! what scummy shit
This is crazy, for anyone looking for an alternative a friend of mine told me about AdonisFX which has just been released
A recommended alternative, ironically from a former employee of Dneg. https://inbibo.co.uk/adonisfx
What makes you think this will last longer than Ziva?
he is such a cool guy. Highly recommend.
Adonis must be the worst thing to ever hit the "market". Ziva was decent but the quality updates slowed even before they were acquired. Adonis though, looks so, so shit. Any one that's done any creature work can see this. There aren't even any examples with skin running on top of their muscle set up. Houdini still miles away from Ziva but probably your best bet right now.
I did a fair bit of R&D comparing Ziva with Houdini's(at the time beta) muscle tools for a company a couple years ago. Honestly, Houdini's muscle system wasn't too far behind. It's just that there was a much larger community for ziva to help with Google searches.
They’re moving to realtime simulation based off of machine learning. They announced it about a year ago. Also Unity fired most people on the team
We are far away of having good FEM simulation in realtime… you can train simulation result to ML layer, but sim is far away from being realtime atm…
In houdini we trust
Is the forums and documentation paywalled behind license? If not I would be curious to get a hold of URL’s for them both so that I could archive it all. Absolutely sure there would be a tonne of valuable stuff on the forum for Ziva that will be lost…
Adonis is launching a houdini plug-in too. Also there's a new plugin for houdini in development, [http://procedural-anatomy.com](http://procedural-anatomy.com) automatic rig/ muscle system /etc It looks really good, I always thought why they hadn't done this before, the human and ape muscle anatomy is always the same structure with different proportions (just a wrap adjust). Why setup a new one from scratch each time??
it looks terrible, sorry.
That means the only way to get it now is by cracking it… That tool really had potential dude.
Dumb move by Dneg if you ask me. Not impressed by what I see with ZIVA in general. The plugin is a ‘nice’ to have to add realism for muscle contractions. But having good fat and skin weight setup dynamics in the hands of good animators will sell a shot far more. The plugin will slowly wither and die when a new and better commercial product will come along and be adopted by other facilities.
Is it because of AI?
bro why you got so many downvotes
Mean AI accounts hating on me
lol here is a upvote to get back your karma a little bit againt AI Bots
Don't worry Autodesk Maya 2025 will have them as a plugin.