Unity buying skin sim tech company for fancy faces and flappy flesh

rockpapershotgun.com:

Two months after announcing they're buying Weta Digital, the CGI studio behind King Of The Hoops and that, Unity are now buying virtual skin. Today the makers of the Unity engine announced the acquisition of Ziva Dynamics, a company whose tech specialises in simulating skin and meat to make fancy facial animations and meaty muscle and such. Their tech powered the flappy flesh of the troll in a recent Hellblade 2 trailer, and has been seen on PlayStations in Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

No, that face still makes me a bit unhappy to look at.

Ziva Dynamics have made software which models muscles, fat, and skin to create more lifelike characters with fancy faces and all that meat. It's been used in films including The Meg but isn't only for pre-rendered 3D. Along with the flappy fleshtroll seen in Hellblade 2's Game Awards trailer, Ziva tech powers the muscle deformation added to PlayStation-exclusive swinger Spider-Man: Miles Morales in a March 2021 patch.

Unity say they want "to further democratise Ziva's best-in-class tools to allow artists, regardless of skill level, to easily and quickly create digital characters unlike ever before". They also add that Ziva's experience can help them "accelerate the process of bringing Weta tools to real-time 3D through the cloud with the power of machine learning".

If you're into gameguts, you might enjoy Ziva's marketing explanation of their work on Hellbade's horrible troll. Starting as a simulation requiring hours of rendering time on a server farm, it ended up as animations running in real time:

"The Ziva Dynamics artists began by building the troll in Ziva VFX, the soft tissue simulation software. This process was expedited by a combination of Ziva's Anatomy Transfer tools and their