Have you heard about Ziva VFX?
Have you heard about Ziva VFX? It is a character creation technology that can help an animator apply real-world physics to parts of the character creation process to deal with muscle growth, tissue tension, reacting to natural elements like heavy winds, water pressure, and more.
The company behind the tool was founded in early 2015 by Academy Award-winning VFX pioneer James Jacobs, a former talent at Weta Digital. Jacobs won the 2013 Scientific and Engineering Award Oscar for the creation of the Tissue Physically-Based Character Simulation Framework. He is now acting as CEO and co-founder of Ziva in Vancouver.
In Ziva, every muscle is said to be made as a tet mesh, being attached to the other muscles and to the bones. Users can paint the fibre field and then activate them any way they want. Please note that it can be active or passive. Then, the muscles are said to be solved with an implicit FEM solver. The tool also features an in-built cloth solver for fine quality skin detail. There are collision and self-collision resolution, non-linear materials and anisotropic materials.
The input here is the skeletal motion and the plugin is said to work out the muscle, fat and skin movement, including skin sliding and high-level detail. This means that a character is built from the inside out, and then the skeleton movement will provide realistic movement.
Ziva’s tools are being used at companies like DNEG and Rising Sun Pictures fundamentally changing the character creation process by combining the effects of real-world physics with the creation of soft-tissue materials like muscles, fat and skin.
The tool is now available as a Maya plugin. You can learn more here.