This Monday, Ziva Dynamics announced a new real time-3D (RT3D) VFX plugin for Maya 2022 to simulate and animate soft tissue on virtual characters.
Maya 2022 is an RT3D amination suite from Autodesk that helps artists create and collaborate efficiently, with a hub of tools made for designing accurately animated characters.
Additionally, the design suite includes tools to accelerate workflows and efficiently scale complex projects. Major movie studios like MGM Pictures currently employ Maya 2022 to create highly-detailed VFX heavy films.
With Ziva’s VFX 2.0 plugin for Maya 2022, the firm has incorporated accurate soft tissue simulation, an Iterative Solver toolkit, playback features, new meshes, and attributes, among others.
Iterative Solver from Ziva is an experimental alternative to Maya’s default direct solver tool for calculating maths for joint-based animation. Ziva updated the solver to enhance the results of the platform’s calculations.
The Vancouver-based firm has added a separate solver feature, solverToleranceFactor, which gives users more control when customising joint-based animation nodes in Maya 2022.
Ziva is also introducing Cache Tet Mesh, which saves built tetmeshes directly to an animation node to speed up production pipelines thanks to smaller RT3D file sizes. Additionally, Ziva is altering the stability and performance for creating fully animated digital humans as part of VFX 2.0.
The news comes after Maya updated its platform in December last year to include Maya Cached Playback, enabling users to easily preview animated RT3D assets.
Using Ziva for Metaverse Development
The updates follow developments in February, when Unity Technologies bought Ziva Dynamics for an undisclosed sum. Unity’s acquisition enabled the firm to adopt Ziva’s powerful character creation suite for augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR/VR/MR) immersive experiences.
Ziva Dynamics created the ZivaRT platform so that RT3D animators can use applied machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) data to create detailed animations.
The purchase enables Unity to provide the advanced Ziva Dynamics toolset to Metaverse content creators, and also democratises advanced RT3D animations for XR developers by combing the latter’s accurate tools with Unity’s efficient production pipeline.
In an interview with XR Today, James Jacob, Co-Founder and CEO of Ziva Dynamics, said,
“Moving forward, one of Unity and Zivas primary goals is to make these [RT3D] capabilities available to all creators, regardless of their skill level. Aided by Unity’s deep knowledge of RT3D graphics and Ziva’s increased access to resources, we’re collectively very excited by the opportunity to transform the character creation process”
Ziva Dynamics designed its RT3D technologies to provide immersive content creators with high-quality animated characters that are “a core value proposition to immersive experiences like those promised by the Metaverse”, Jacob said at the time.
