MetaHuman figures- Usable in Unity?

Some quick searching of their forums largely turned up a vague statement about legalities but I finally found a real statement on what they would consider grounds to deny the license.

https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost489934.aspx

Content that is "socially unacceptable by most people". I'm willing to bet there are a lot of popular games out there that would qualify for that. Fallout 3 immediately comes to mind with its themes and depictions of slavery.

Are they including theft? Murder? Drugs? Excessive alcohol? We don't know and that's the catch. By requiring you ask for permission it allows them to change their mind at any point. They may initially approve your game only to deny it after production is underway and suddenly you're screwed.

 

Sauce: https://store.zivadynamics.com/

Anyone can confirm if this is a character creation tool?
Or is this just an example asset like Zeke, Lila, and Gala? (Asking because it says "Create/Make unlimited" as compared to other asset in the store)

 

Between the store info, docs, and faq I believe it's similar to buying a character for Daz3D.

 

Isn't Ziva just a muscle simulation tool and nothing like CC4 or metahuman which allow complete modelling and shaping???

 

Ugh.

This reminds me of the time when 3dcoat had religious statements in their license.

Honestly speaking, one of the consumers of character generators would be people making porn. So in this case it smells like they want to eat the cake and still have it.

 

FYI: we aren't talking about Ziva's license, it's Reallusion's license (Character Creator 4). Just making sure, we're on the same page, I haven't checked Ziva's license yet, it may or may not contain something equally dangerous.

 

I"ve fixed it.

 

ugh, I was investing this as a potential solution, guess UMA (but it's not pretty just as a mesh, I know it's a code framework) and makehuman (kind of old, I guess good enough for starter basemesh) are still the go to... I don't remember if old manual bastioni had a bad license, the new open source mb lab have very bad mesh and is only good for the code.

Nothing free that help with facial animation though...

 

Asset store used to have assets for prettier UMA base models. Bastioni .... bastioni had ragequit and stopped supporting his tool, besides it doesn't work in newer blender. Actually he pretty much destroyed his tool, apparently he wanted to generate money from it, but it didn't work out.

Someone picked it up, but, uh:
https://github.com/animate1978/MB-Lab/blob/master/license.txt

The output is AGPL,. and that makes the tool useless. I suppose you might be able to use latest public release by Bastioni and not the GPLed code, because that one did not have AGPL output restrictions.

So, all things considered, you only have makehuman. And only "official" output plugin and not the third party one. They're also dodgy about their license: http://www.makehumancommunity.org/content/license_explanation.html

Regarding facial animation, I believe AutoRigPro can help with those somewhat, at least it can generate facial rig relatively easily.

 

Thanks for the information!

 

You're not allowed to use MetaHumans outside of Unreal engine.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq?active=metahuman

 

Uggg. I guess a business has to protect their interests but that's kind of shiity

 

It is their golden goose technology. (Or was it golden hen?)

They'll protect it with extreme prejudice and obviously they'll try to lock you into unreal engine if you want to use it. Regarding "S***ty", I'm fairly sure I've seen worse. At least it won't infect your whole project like a viral license would.

 

Is it really that S***ty? They’ve spend the resources, creating a tool their costumers can use for “free, why should they be doing the legwork for Unity? It would be like Unity releasing Ziva for free, allowing its use in UE - never gonna happen.

 

Let's say it's unusual to forbid such things via the license when the software side would fully be capable of that. But indeed, they offer that for free, so it's hard to really complain.

 

((Captain obvious mode: On

Remember when Microsoft released DX10 and said it will not be available for WinXP and by doing that tried to force you to upgrade? Same deal.

It is a form of bait designed to lure you into using their product and then lock you into it.

People tend to view this sort of thing in less positively than release of a tool that is available for free to everybody with no restrictions.

 

Except Unity has nothing to do with epic. It would be more like Microsoft making directx available on osx.

 

Also since then, it seems there has been emerging alternative (omniverse?), and also the tech seems "accessible" to anyone who can produce the data to feed the algorithm... Notice the scare quote. It's a data problem.

 

Does anyone know if portrait images of metahuman characters can be used in a Unity game?

 

I would say No, since they can't be used in Unity games, I'm not sure it just being a portrait would make any difference. I wouldn't test Epic's lawyers and bank my game on it. If you need a good character creator for portraits have you heard of artbreeder.com?

 

My guess is that the same restrictions would apply. Another option would be to use Daz or any other program that allows you to generate base portraits and then use Stable Diffusion's image to image in concert with Canny ControlNet (to keep the basic features and silhouette) and a subtle LoRA or embedding to add exactly the style you want.

 

Yeah just wondering if it's specifically allowed for whatever reason.

Thanks for the suggestion, I really don't like artbreeder though, I see them in games and it just doesn't look fitting, like someone ran a photograph of someone off the street through a few photoshop filters. I also want to have the same outfit, a consistent presentation, and multiple settings for a variety of characters.

At this point I think iClone is the only decent option, with the headshot plugin and a bunch of AI generated faces I should get everything I need.

Yeah I wouldn't mind something that could do a good job of stylizing multiple character renders in a digital paint style, just rendering a character is not ideal for a portrait image. Especially if it enhanced the expression too. Haven't looked that far ahead yet though.

 

The speed that Epic moves is enviable. Metahuman has become Wrap4d, Ziva Face Trainer, and CC4 all in one while Unity has yet to integrate any character tech into the pipeline.

 

Metahuman don't handle body "properly", not that people had any problem dealing with that aspect.

 

While true today, and I think metahumans now look better with custom bodies, they are working on that as well. The last step I see them implementing is a hair grooming tool instead of preset hairstyles, thanks to Epic's acquisition of Shave and Haircut. Then they'd have a pretty full fledged AAA character creation platform

 

I was definitely NOT up to date, thanks! Things are starting to move too fast.

 

The frustrating part is that Ziva is pretty much the Unity equivalent rigging wise, ML deformer and all, but it hasn't been integrated.

 

Ziva is part of Unity Industry now.

 

Unity needs to acquire these people for their AI initiative. It's pretty average right now but the future potential of the technology is immense.
https://twitter.com/DeemosTech/status/1642443338606587906?s=20

 

Absolutely no one in their right mind should want them to acquire a company that has a useful product. We have a thread where some of the companies they acquired (Pixyz and Ziva) now have products tied to the much more expensive "contact us to negotiate a license" Unity Industry. I hope you don't mind paying a whole lot more.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/question-to-unity-industry-changes.1420997/

 

I came here after looking at the code for the Enemies demo and saw references to Ziva. I then spent an hour looking at the Ziva site and have NO CLUE what it is they actually offer except for some Maya plugin for over the top big study simulations. The poster above showed HUMANS as a version, but that seems to be missing now on the Ziva sales page, so it is not clear if that is now bundled with the Indie package or not and or if Maya is a required as most videos I did find all happened inside Maya as plugins.

I am actually working on video and graphic design production through Unity, not game development. So I can appreciate the level of detail that Ziva demo videos show to offer. But even for me this seems like WAY too much, when really one just needs something good enough like what we see through MetaHumans. MetaHuman's isn't really that advanced once one breaks down components, what I think a lot of people are actually seeing and stunned by is the lighting and camera trickery within the Metahuman console. That's nothing Unity can't also do.

My point is if Unity wants a competitive solution to MetaHuman, Ziva isn't it. They need something a bit more down to earth and usable for even entry level users LIKE MH. And honestly a small team of a coder, modeler and graphic designer could knock something out within a year. Acquiring expensive studios like Ziva that require huge sums of additional money on top of the Unity subscriptions isn't going to appeal to the vast majority of users and just allows Unreal to continue expand their lead.

 

The vast majority of users don't bring in money that can sustain Unity and a generic MT alternative won't help with that either. Ziva does bring in money from the highest levels of productions - large teams (with lots of licenses), big budgets and all that.

And unless you're talking about AAA adoption, Unreal is not leading anywhere else. It has a smaller userbase and both engines are roughly growing the same amount if you look at games released on Steam in recent years. There is no indication that Unreal is overtaking Unity in game development, I can't speak for other industries though.

 

If by "same amount" you mean absolute amount of games released on Steam, then Unreal is gaining marketshare.

 

I mean both engines are gaining market share at roughly the same rate.

Unity games released in 2021: 5,697
Unity games released in 2022: 6,193
8.7% increase

UE games released in 2021: 1,678
UE games released in 2022: 1,846
10% increase

Data from https://steamdb.info/

 

If I read you correctly you mean the only advantage Unit is after is Big Money Studio Licensing fees? That' not really the kind of Unity see here in the forums..maybe in some back corp office zoom call maybe. And I couldn't imagine one wouldn't want to cover ones assets big and small. Even though Metahuman was created by a tiny team for renally nothing. It's a x10000 more known in tech circles than Ziva.

Basically one doesn't have to go all in on just one.

And unless they come up with an actual streamlined method for how they did Enemies...some tool for converting to that SDF and Ziva stuff it's laced with, it's just a troll video. Where Unreal actually has something people are using NOW.

That's every day new people learn how to use Metahuman because that's what they want and NEVER will ever look at Unity...But if that's not Unity's market anymore I should would like to know so I too can bail over to Unreal.

 

Forum is not representative of the major revenue streams of Unity. We're a vocal minority here.

Brand recognition is not the goal for Ziva acquisition, nor is it an attempt to compete with MetaHuman. It's another service that makes Unity profitable and covers one of the more common use cases for high end productions.

I don't know what that means. Unity stays in business via paid services that are layered on top of the free core engine. The engine itself is not profitable. Are you asking Unity to make the acquired expensive services to also be free? They're barely profitable as it is.

Usage of a free tool that is subsidized with Fortnite and Tencent F*** you money is not conductive to making the engine profitable. People need to stop comparing engines that have completely different business models and then expect the same to happen in Unity. It's just not possible to repeat what Epic does, they're in a unique position.

What will Unity lose if you move? One Plus or Pro license? Licensing fees is not even the main revenue stream for Unity. You have to understand that Unity have long since outgrown the grassroots indie guy/gal. What if Unity suddenly make Ziva free like MetaHuman, how will they get revenue from a free tool you want? A studio that trains Ziva data and buys their services for tens of thousands of dollars, buys 1st party enterprise support, source access and other Unity services, however, keeps them in business. Doesn't matter what you see on the forums.

 

Dude, all I hear is that you have zero idea what you're talking about. Unity already has tools to create SDF assets. From TextMeshPro and by this extension the new UI Toolkit - tangent Text for Unity which will replace TMP over time. But more important to this example are the sdf-bake-tool and point caches. So yes, Unity is providing them and well within in progress to make good tooling for VFX and it only will improve as they got the Weta team on board and I'm pretty sure their expertise is already flowing into Unity's development as we talk here.

 

Game dev circles maybe. Movie CGI circles definitely not.

 

I often use Modo for character design and I've been able to somehow replicate the Metahuman facial rig, which is mostly a joint based rig with corrective blendshapes, and an internal logic to drive the rig.

I could probably recreate MOST of it in a few months time and be able to reuse the module on all my characters. The challenge here will be to sculpt every expression for each character (unless you use Wrap3 in ZBrush to build facial poses from a base) and tweak joint positions and redo the weights

 

Ziva is not a single software product, but a suite of technologies including ZivaVFX, ZivaRT, and ZivaFaceTrainer.

ZivaVFX is a Maya plugin that enables high-fidelity muscle simulations. It is widely used in the VFX industry and is preferred by many top studios. This technology surpasses standard FEM solvers and provides the ability to create hyper-realistic muscle simulations. IMO, its toolset is unmatched by any other publicly available solvers.
https://zivadynamics.com/testimonials

ZivaRT is the machine-learning technology that allows for the training and playback of deformations decoupled from a solver input. Its 'deformer' supports Maya, Unity, Unreal, and even custom engines have use it eg. Insomniac Games Spiderman.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.zivart-player@0.1/manual/zivart-player-component.html
https://www.newswire.com/news/senua...y-reveals-character-by-ziva-dynamics-21569515

ZivaFaceTrainer is a cloud-based tool with a large database specifically designed for training faces. It provides training data that can be used by the ZivaRT plugin/package eg .https://zivadynamics.com/ziva-face-trainer

Based on what I have seen publicly, MetaHuman has good tooling but is still working toward achieving VFX-quality results. On the other hand, Ziva already has achieved high quality, but pending some tooling. IMO Ziva's position is stronger as hitting that type of quality is much more difficult. Getting that last 5% is 99% of the battle.