Ziva VFX v1.4 offers greater artistic control and out-of-the-box functionality than ever before. We worked closely with the Ziva Community to discover the fastest, most intuitive ways to improve collaboration, reduce the need for workarounds, and dramatically accelerate simulation speeds. The new 1.4 features include: Maya Fields compatibility, Rest-Scale for Tissues, Muscle Growth, Ziva Scene Panel, and the Pressure & Surface Tension tissue tools.

External Forces / Maya Fields compatibility

The new Maya Fields compatibility, also referred to as “External Forces”, lets you apply Earth’s elements to your simulations using the standard to Maya Field tools. Instantly, your character can flap in the wind, ripple underwater, or even repel towards or away from magnet-like objects. This new feature is meeting the needs of creature TDs everywhere – helping them achieve the final results of huge reptilian wings, gaping fish gills, and much more.

Rest Scale for Tissues 

The new Rest Scale feature allows a tissue to grow/shrink uniformly in all directions, across an entire volume, similar to the Rest Scale for Cloth function. It can be used to grow or shrink parts of the character for animation or modeling purposes, like instantly making the Jellyphant’s ears 2x larger, all while maintaining collisions, gravity and other simulation parameters. This function is helping improve the collaboration between modellers and riggers, and increase creative control for independent artists.

Muscle Growth

Similar to Rest Scale for Tissues, the new Muscle Growth function is giving creators more control over the final look of their characters. The Muscle Growth feature makes it possible to grow or shrink muscles in the direction perpendicular to the muscle fiber. Instantly, your character can become bulkier or leaner without any additional assistance from a modeller. The results respect and preserve existing collisions and physical-correctness so your creature is plausibly bulkier or leaner, instantly. Similarly, the feature can be used to increase muscle bulge during excitation for rudimentary extra control over the muscle shape in contracted states.

Ziva Scene Panel

With the new Ziva Scene Panel, also referred to as ‘zSP’ or ‘zSPanel’, you can more easily visualize your builds and select specific items and nodes within your Ziva VFX Maya scenes. The new panel leverages a tree-like structure to show the connections and relationships between various objects, functions, and layers, much like other leading design softwares – so you’ll be comfortable and well-acquainted with the simplified view option. This feature was highly requested by our more advanced independent creators who sought an effortless, more compact view of their complex builds.

Pressure & Surface Tension for Tissues

Lastly, we found that the Fascia pass was one of the more confusing parts of Ziva simulations. Many users required additional assistance to achieve the detailed fascia results they wanted, so we decided to fix that fundamentally by developing the new Pressure & Surface Tension properties for tissues. These new settings makes it easier and faster to achieve the detailed, high-quality wrinkling and sliding effects that Ziva is known for, and reduces the complexity of the simulation passes as a whole.

The new Pressure attribute for tissues that allows the user to easily “shrink wrap” the fat layer directly around the muscle system, similar to the Pressure for cloth function that was released in Ziva VFX 1.3.  

The new surface tension function, on the other hand, minimize the surface area of an object while respecting elasticity and other forces. Effectively, this shrinks the object across its surface, but not in the interior. For example, if it is applied to to an elastic cube, it will turn it to a spherical shape. This feature can be used in conjunction with pressure for tissues for shrink-wrapping the fat layer around the muscle geometry. This tends to stabilize the shrink-wrapping process compared to using the pressure alone.

Additional information about the latest Ziva VFX version 1.4 features are available in the Ziva VFX Documentation, including detailed descriptions about how the tools work and suggested inputs for effective results.