VFX House DNEG Acquires Exclusive License to Ziva Technologies From Unity
Visual effects house DNEG has acquired the exclusive license to Ziva from Unity. The company will also onboard a significant proportion of the Ziva team.
The Ziva toolset powers the creation of digital characters and creatures for film, TV and gaming cinematics. It also brings cinema-quality characters into real-time gaming environments and introduces interactive digital humans and characters to elevate immersive experiences across live entertainment, retail, healthcare and more.
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DNEG CEO Namit Malhotra said in a statement that the transaction furthers the company’s strategy of investment in technology. “The integration of the Ziva toolset into our technology stack helps our artists to deliver incredible cinematic performances and experiences for discerning movie-lovers worldwide, and also supports our strategic move into immersive experiences with the launch of DNEG IXP, enabling the creation of feature film-quality digital characters and creatures in gaming and immersive environments,” Malhotra said.
DNEG Global CTO Paul Salvini said: “Bringing the Ziva toolset in-house – along with a significant proportion of the team behind it – is a perfect fit for DNEG and gives us a strong competitive advantage in the development of sophisticated and wholly convincing digital characters and creatures. This is an important area of growth for DNEG and will further enhance our digital character and creature work, not just for film and episodic work, but for real-time and immersive applications too.” He continued, “Ziva will be fully integrated into our new, state-of-the-art pipeline – Helix – expanding our portfolio of artist tools and helping to position our technology as the preeminent platform in the industry for content creation at the very highest levels of quality.”
Launched last month, DNEG IXP is DNEG’s immersive experiences division. The division brings DNEG’s technology to brands, businesses and game publishers.
DNEG has previously utilized the Ziva toolset on recent projects such as “Dune: Part 2,” “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” “Venom,” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” as well as upcoming releases like “Animal Friends” and the animated feature “The Garfield Movie.”
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