It was unexpected news: Unity has decided to cease the sale and support of Ziva products, including the plugin for creating realistic and dynamic simulations of soft tissues and muscles, its real-time counterpart Ziva Real-Time, and the cloud-based facial rig creation service Ziva Face Trainer.
Goodbye Ziva: Unity stops selling its products
Effective April 2, 2024, Unity will no longer actively sell or support these products. These changes are part of ongoing product discontinuations and job cuts, which also include ending its tool development agreement with the visual effects facility Wētā FX, used in high-profile visual effects projects such as Dune, many recent Marvel films, and Game of Thrones.
Some former Ziva developers will join DNEG, a notable visual effects company, which acquired an exclusive perpetual license of the intellectual property.
This marks the definitive farewell to the tools Unity acquired from their original company, Ziva Dynamics, in 2022.
Following this, two new AI-based tools were introduced: the online Ziva Face Trainer for facial rig creation and the real-time character deformation system Ziva RT.
All three were discontinued without prior notice: an email informing users that the products would no longer be sold or supported was sent yesterday, while Unity announced the news on its blog.
Subscribers can choose to convert their existing licenses to five-year licenses to continue using the products beyond their current expiration dates, albeit without active support.
They have until October 2, 2024, to download the new license keys, after which they will lose access to the Ziva customer portal, including online documentation.
Part of the Ziva team will move to the new Ziva license holder, DNEG.
A “significant portion” of the original Ziva team will move to the international visual effects company – and long-time user of Ziva tools – DNEG, which acquired an exclusive perpetual license of the Ziva intellectual property.
According to DNEG’s blog post, the technology will “further enhance” its creature pipeline and will also be used by its new division DNEG IXP for immersive experiences.There is no mention of any plans to make the technology available as commercial products.
Unity also retains ownership of all technology acquired from Ziva Dynamics and will “continue to evaluate the best way” to use it to “enhance its core offerings.”
Part of an ongoing series of layoffs and discontinuations of Unity’s non-core products
In January, Unity revealed plans to lay off 25% of its workforce as part of a continuous “reset” to focus on its core gaming products – Unity Editor, Unity Cloud, and its monetization services – and “likely discontinue” other non-core products in the future.
Unity had previously terminated its professional services agreement with the visual effects facility Wētā FX, laying off 265 employees involved in the development of Weta’s in-house tools, acquired by Unity in 2021.
Some of that technology was supposed to become commercially available through Unity Wētā Tools: an offering now further reduced by the discontinuation of Ziva products.
In addition to the functionalities of the Unity game engine itself, the only major technology listed on the Unity Wētā tools webpage still commercially available is SpeedTree, the toolset for generating plants acquired by Unity in 2021 and widely used in games as well as visual effects.
For more information:
- https://www.dneg.com/dneg-acquires-exclusive-license-to-ziva-technologies-from-unity/
- https://blog.unity.com/news/update-about-ziva