Ziva VFX 1.7 Interview: James Jacobs, Co-CEO of Ziva Dynamics

Ziva VFX 1.7 Interview: James Jacobs, Co-CEO of Ziva Dynamics

October 1, 2019 – Ziva Dynamics is the world’s leading virtual character software company. Ziva’s physics computation and simulation platform, coupled with standardized character assets, offer groundbreaking solutions for creating high-quality virtual humans and creatures, and designing lifelike digital experiences. Founded in 2015, Ziva’s technology is used by leading film, entertainment, retail and consumer brand companies around the world.

Today, James Jacobs spoke to VFX Online and talked about Ziva VFX 1.7.

// From James Jacobs, Co-CEO of Ziva Dynamics

Tell us a bit more about the new features available in Ziva VFX 1.7.

Art Directable Rest Shapes is the primary new feature in Ziva VFX 1.7. It enables artists to control the silhouettes/shapes of their characters directly with Maya’s built-in sculpting tools, without losing all the benefits that a physically based character simulation provides.

Users can simply duplicate the tissue mesh of their main character, sculpt their new shape onto the duplicate, and add the new geometry as a Rest Shape and keyframe its effect on select frames. ADRS will command the simulation to intuitively morph to hit the new target mesh shape, creating a smooth, novel deformation that adheres to laws of physics and motion, expanding the creative potential of every shot.

Can you go into more detail about Art Directable Rest Shapes (ADRS) and how it helps different kinds of artists?

ADRS makes the job of hitting the artistic goals of the character easier, regardless of your level of experience.

For lifelike creature sims, such as the 10 quadrupeds in Pixomondo’s A Dog’s Way Home or Ziva’s Zeke the Lion, once the artist is happy with the overall dynamic properties of their creature, they can now easily add an additional level of realism or creativity through sculpted details, which are easily embedded into the simulation. For example, a common application of ADRS is to sculpt a more precise or more pronounced muscle for a specific shot sequence. This may be for stylistic or realism purposes. Achieving such results without ADRS would traditionally demand hours of needless corrective work. ADRS has the potential to save hours of parameter tuning and removes the need for ad-hoc shot fixes that risk breaking the dynamics and secondary effects (like jiggle, skin sliding, and wrinkling).

This practice can also be applied to even more challenging and granular sims, like those found in a facial pipeline. Lifelike human faces are always a challenging venture – our brains are so finely tuned to recognize any inorganic movements on a human face, even if only subconsciously. This makes it monumentally important that the secondary dynamics are never at risk. With ADRS, teams can now sculpt the complex deformations of a face, like brow ridge raising, mouth movements, or cheek muscle contractions, all while maintaining the critical skin wrinkling, stretching, and pulling that naturally occurs on expressive faces. In the Mr. Ink example given in the Ziva VFX Resources, viewers can see Mr. Ink’s shoulder rapidly shifting between 3 challenging silhouettes without the need for any additional rigging. Users can expect the same speed and accuracy for their complex simulations.

Lastly, ADRS can be applied to feature animation simulations as well. For animated films, the overall laws of motion need not apply – characters often move in non-anatomical ways or break their natural shape for comedic or dramatic effect. As such, the need for artistic control is paramount. ADRS lets feature animation artists alter the shape of their characters to achieve the unique silhouettes they want.

What challenges did you face when developing Ziva VFX 1.7? Can you share any fun stories from that time?

The ADRS toolset really speaks to the artistic side of character creation, but in doing so, it challenged our affinity for biomechanics. At Ziva, we have a strong belief that if you want something to look natural, the best thing to do is to first understand why it looks the way it does, and then from an anatomy and physics stand-point, reproduce said behaviour. So it was important for us to come up with a solution that met the goals of direct artistic control, without having to sacrifice everything that we hold dear. Thankfully, many high-profile customers weighed in, and provided practical use cases of how and why this capability was needed. In the end, ADRS came together remarkably well, offering a creative extension of Ziva VFX. We are really proud of the way it manages to fuse art and science so seamlessly.

How has the Ziva character simulation method continued to evolve? How do you make sure you are always being helpful to 3D artists?

Ziva VFX has continued to grow at a consistent and reliable pace since day one, with a new release every quarter. However, the goals of the technology grow and change over time. After Ziva VFX 1.5, we recognized that the realism and accuracy of our tools was already profound. Boutique VFX houses were comfortable adopting Ziva to compete with the big studios, and the big studios were improving what they already excelled in. So now that Ziva VFX has improved character quality, we’re focusing a lot more on scalability. Ziva VFX 1.6 and 1.7 both offer greater speed and repeatable ‘best in class’ results. They also include features designed to broaden the user base (Anatomy Transfers in 1.6 and ADRS in 1.7)

As for ensuring the helpfulness of our tools, we have two main strategies. First, it has always been crucial that we have internal team members who can act as “customers.” These individuals have decades of experience in the VFX world and have led creature teams to award-winning success. They provide Ziva with the insights and real-world experience to inform our tools and remain a few steps ahead of industry norms so we can tackle problems before they arise. Second, ever since our first beta software release in 2015, we’ve kept close ties with many of the world’s top studios. Their creature teams help to inform many of our features and identify the most relevant obstacles that we should tackle. It’s been wonderful working so closely with industry leaders and we’re proud to say that we’ve also begun to include insights from academic institutions and indie artists to improve accessibility and ease of use.

What are the system requirements for Ziva VFX?

Ziva VFX is a plugin for Autodesk’s Maya and is currently built against Maya 2016-2019 for both Windows or Linux.

Tell us a bit more about the studios using Ziva VFX 1.7, and how they are using it.

Ziva is currently used by over 120 of the world’s leading VFX studios and academic institutions. Frequently, our customers express an improvement of look, speed, and budget for their character work using Ziva VFX.

According to John Hughes, President of Tau Films, “We had only a few months and a few artists to get everything through production. So the ask was pretty big: We needed a commercial solution that offered muscle and skin dynamics that could rival those of the big teams that have decades of proprietary software behind them. Ziva delivered exactly what we needed.”

Similarly, according to Janak Thakker, Co-Founder & Sr. Animation Supervisor at FABLEfx, “Since our focus is realistic creatures, we’ve dreamt about an off the shelf tool like Ziva ever since we opened our doors almost 4 years ago. Now, we’ve been using it for most of our 2018 projects and will keep doing so for years to come.”

What scenes/characters was Ziva VFX used on for Game of Thrones, Good Omens, Hellboy and A Dog’s Way Home?

Ziva VFX was used by Scanline VFX to make the remarkable Drogon in Game of Thrones season 8.

Milk VFX used Ziva VFX to simulate the devil wings, devil body anatomy, and evil dog in Good Omens.

Mr. X used Ziva VFX to simulate all 5 mythical characters in HellBoy: The grugache (man/boar hybrid), three evil giants, and the were-jaguar (bipedal jaguar). The team used numerous different Ziva VFX approaches to achieve varying levels of fidelity under demanding timelines. Click here for more information.

Pixomondo used Ziva VFX to simulate most of the animals in the cast of A Dog’s Way Home. Ten of the 13 creatures were rapidly generated using the pre-existing Ziva quadruped anatomy paired with the 1.6 Anatomy Transfer toolset.

How does Ziva VFX’s zRBFWarp feature work?

zRBFWarp is part of Ziva’s anatomy transfer workflow. This function can warp geometry located outside of the creature. For example, zRBFWarp can be used to warp geometry for hair, eyebrows, or other external details. As of Ziva VFX 1.7, this deformer can warp Maya meshes, NURBS surfaces, and NURBS curves.

Any new updates to the Ziva store or the assets provided for artists?

We recently released Gala, our Quarter Horse asset. She has already been adopted by multiple studios to accelerate their hooved creature pipeline. As for complementary assets, Zeke the Lion and Lila the Cheetah are both available to full license holders. Additional free assets include Mr. Ink and the Jellyphant. We have recently released extensive tutorial videos using the Jellyphant to showcase feature animation workflows for simple single-volume assets.

What is in the future?

Users can always expect great new tools for Ziva VFX. However, the more exciting news, perhaps, is the gigantic strides we’re making in other solutions. We can’t say much right now, but we’ve begun building tools that expand beyond simulations. We’re going to be solving character problems on a much larger scale, very soon.

We would like to thank James Jacobs for the great interview, and if you like to know more about Ziva Dynamics, please visit at Ziva Dynamics.