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Unity Acquires Ziva Dynamics

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by KRGraphics, Jan 24, 2022.

  1. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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    Versus Epic Games who already have the new features fleshed out, in beta, and ready to show
     
  2. Well, I don't give a flying ef about Epic Games. When I work with Unreal I go to their forums to talk about it.
     
  3. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    Epic Games are extremely relevant to this discussion, I think. Their acquisitions not only are usually made with the intent of actually getting them into the engine and general UE ecosystem, but their pricing schemes typically become much more amenable after acquisition. For instance, not only did Quixel's offerings get a price change, but they also have a massive library of free stuff if you use them in their engine.

    Meanwhile, the price schemes of Unity acquisitions either stay the same in general or sometimes increase. Unity not being able to match even that angle of the offering on top of the substantial time-to-integration is a pretty significant problem.
     
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  4. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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    I was looking to get into speedtree, which I believe is owned by Unity, and I have to purchase a license. Would be nice to integrate it into the engine
     
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  5. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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  6. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    Not to mention it's actually kind of a pain in the ass to try and evaluate SpeedTree at all. The Indie offering is so barebones that it's not really useful as an evaluation tool.
     
  7. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    Did that really change, though? I've not checked lately, but for years after that acquisition even the links for the manual directed people to the developer's separate web page, and implementation relied on a hacky 3rd party resources import step. It became free on the Asset Store and got into the Package Manager, but otherwise still felt and was treated like a 3rd party asset.

    I guess if all people care about is the price then, yeah, it changed. But honestly that's not high on my list of priorities when looking at something to use in development. If it's worth my time then it's probably worth the licensing cost anyway. I care far more about things such as quality of integration, reliability of support, and development quality of life.
     
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  8. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    I have been monitoring Mesh to metaHuman video on youtube, it's a very powerful tool! It almost work for pixar type of character,except the eyes which need to be moved and resized, but that's one trivial round trip to an external DCC. It's not perfect, but the alternative is to pay a high skill artist for one month to get the details and transfer of blendmap, mesh to metahuman is 5mn for good enough result, 30 mn for advence result, and probably one day or two to adjust in a dcc, it's order of magnitude faster, and above good enough for any starting indie. And you can quickly do a performance capture with your phone and live link. Really they only need to solve body morph target, motion capture and realistic animation for full body and it's revolutionary.

    That's the competition unity have, ziva might be impressive in a vacuum, but will the hypothetical future toolset and workflow be as efficient? Well at least they have a competitor to look at.
     
  9. frosted

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    Speedtree is an interesting example. It seems like after acquisition...I really never heard about speedtree again. There was some basic integration back in like unity 5, but it sucked.

    I actually used speedtree for a bit and ended up switching away because it was just order magnitude cheaper (and better performance) using the billions of other tree offerings.

    It's really weird that UT would buy the whole company and not bother with any kind of tight integration. Like moving the speedtree editor into unity proper, etc

    Hm, maybe looking at it from UT's perspective, they'd end up both losing the subscription fee income, as well as asset store sales. If you could just grind out free trees and environment - I'm sure they'd lose a ton of revenue from the store - nature environment packs probably bring in a good percentage of store revenue.
     
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  10. So, the expectations are:
    - pay for the company and the IP
    - give the results for free
    - double the development costs, because you want it in the game editor, but they can't give up the original tree editor, since the actual paying customers (AA, AAA studios) are using it and they probably wouldn't install Unity Editor just for making tree arts...

    IDK, I kind of understand why they don't do this.
     
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  11. Murgilod

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    These things exist outside of use for Unity. SpeedTree specifically is engine agnostic. It maps practically 1:1 with Epic Games' acquisition of Quixel. Both SpeedTree and MegaScans are used in games at all levels. The very business model is "sure, you can use it in other engines, but if you use our engine (which comes with paying us a license), you get even better service."

    You're deliberately misrepresenting what's going on here and I think you know it.
     
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  12. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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  13. BIGTIMEMASTER

    BIGTIMEMASTER

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    It's been a minute since I did the work but I dont remember any particular issues using speedtree in unity. I thought that I used a free trial but if not, it's a $19 month to month cost to use it anyway so, pretty cheap.

    I dunno anything about mTree maybe its great but speedtree is the most mature tree software and I'm a moron and was able to make it work so, just offering a word of praise.
     
  14. Ryiah

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    It's not that you can't make it work. If that were the case no one would use it at all. It's that there are limitations and bugs in both Unity's integration and SpeedTree itself that have been there since when it was first made available to Unity developers.

    I'm not recommending MTree because it's perfect. I'm recommending it because it includes full source code. Worst case you can either fix it yourself, see if anyone else is using it and has fixed it, or hire someone to do it for you. All of which can't be done with SpeedTree.
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2022
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  15. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    On this mild tangent, I also have MTree but don't use it. In the end it's best to just make small bits of tree and kitbash them together (in my experience anyway). All this procedural stuff is meant to save time if you need a lot of different trees. Most games have pretty similar vegetation throughout so a small team or an indie with some art talent can just make some optimised pieces and kitbash the vegetation they like.

    That's what I've done and I didn't need to battle MTree or need source for anything really. The approach that inspired me to do this was from the Horizon Zero Dawn GDC talk.

    It's tempting to think you need a vegetation generator to begin with.

    But perhaps you can use a few bought models for textures and refs but do it yourself. After all, you need a lot less vegetation types than character types, and vegetation takes considerably less time and accuracy to make.
     
  16. Murgilod

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    Yeah, if I'm making multiple different types of trees covering a wide variety of forests, or I need a wide variety of the same kind of tree (EXTREMELY useful for leafless trees since they have more obvious silhouettes), I'll use MTree or similar. Generally speaking though, I usually just use a much more simple setup I have that kitbashes them using geometry nodes in Blender. It's much easier to match art style doing it that way.
     
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  17. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Soz lets get back to Ziva. No pimping products etc.. feel free to make a tree topic tho.
     
  18. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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    My bad. I am building an HMC and I hope to use Ziva someday, but I wonder if it's limited to 4d or ML cameras, or I can use my GoPro camera for the footage
     
  19. Deleted User

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    In GDC they said they will be combining all the accquired tools in a single unified cloud based tool and will be usable with unity.... They said this will take 2+years
     
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  20. MadeFromPolygons

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    That statement reeks of "additional paid service" unfortunately. I would be super surprised at this stage of there is not a price tag attached to use this 'cloud tool'.
     
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  21. Murgilod

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    It also reeks of "excessively optimistic timeline from UT." Unity is great at missing proposed timeframes and even better at lurching across the finish line two years behind schedule with a lacklustre implementation of what they proposed.
     
  22. Deleted User

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    They spoke nothing about pricing but they kept saying one thing that ,"no body must start with blank canvas", maybe that's the hint which I think, means that some part of the tool must be free or limited
    They have clearly stated that it would take 2 or more than two years... I think that there is no point of talking about these acquisitions now, till unity themselves reveal something with more details
     
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  23. Murgilod

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    There is definitely a point because this is a historical problem with Unity and it's important to temper expectations with that in mind.
     
  24. CursiveCrow

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    Then I guess I'll care about Unity in 2+ years; when they have feature parity with their primary competitor.
     
  25. Ryiah

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    Therein lies the problem. Everyone including their primary competitor will have moved forward 2+ years too.
     
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  26. neoshaman

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    Also not everybody monitor the state of neural rendering, but it's shaping to be a paradigm shift that may render their research practically moot down the line, this field is starting to go toward practicality now.
     
  27. DragonCoder

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    Very unlikely that Unity will catch up to full on AAA features, let alone for free.
    But that does not make the engine less good for Indies.
     
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  28. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I think you can integrate them now. For example Vivox has Unity integrations but you have to ask or be using the service to get them. I imagine it's the same for Ziva, but Unity did state they needed to do some additional work. Perhaps a staff member from Ziva would be kind enough to set the record straight, if someone would ask them.
     
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  29. ina

    ina

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    curious what's the latest?