The flurry of Unity acquisitions continue, following hot on the trail of their recent Weta Digital and SpeedTree purchases, Unity have announced they have acquired Ziva Dynamics. Ziva Dynamics provide tools for digital character creation, used heavily in TV & Film (such as John Wick 3, Pacific Rim Uprising and Game of Thrones) as well as a push toward real-time games with Viva RT.
Details of the acquisition from the Unity blog:
As the leading deformation and simulation artist tool for real-time and games, Ziva has become the new standard for high-quality creature work, blurring the lines between art and reality for hundreds of film and game studios on titles such as Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II and movies and TV like Game of Thrones and Godzilla vs. Kong.
By acquiring Ziva, Unity aims to further democratize Ziva’s best-in-class tools to allow artists, regardless of skill level, to easily and quickly create digital characters unlike ever before. Additionally, through this acquisition, Unity can also accelerate the process of bringing Weta tools to real-time 3D through the cloud with the power of machine learning. Ziva has already solved the challenge of bringing complex film-quality simulations to RT3D. Together, we plan to make the creation of believable digital characters accessible to a wide range of platforms and artists, at scale.
They also released this video showing the virtual human character Emma, created using Ziva technology but running real-time in the Unity game engine. The product most game developers will be interested in, ZivaRT (which looks like a direct answer to Unreal Engine’s MetaHumans) is currently only available as a private beta, but hopefully the Unity acquisition changes that quickly.
You can learn more about Unity acquiring Ziva Dynamics in the video below.