From mesh to rigged and real-time
Creating characters that perform complex and believable expressions can be time-consuming and expensive. Ziva Face Trainer accelerates the workflow by providing an accessible way to automatically generate film-quality facial rigging for your characters, ready for animation in Maya and Unity.
Robust facial controls
Ziva Faces are high-performance, fully rigged puppets that can express over 72,000 training shapes, as well as novel face poses.
"Ziva Face Trainer is a unique workflow that boosts our creative process, allowing us to augment and spend time where it counts for fidelity, allowing us to provide higher quality base work as well as more detailed photoreal content."
Other solutions for character artists
Ziva VFX
Produce fast, lifelike simulations of character and cloth movement for stylized or realistic characters and creatures.
Digital Human Package
Based on the technology behind the Enemies demo, this package includes facial animation and skin attachment systems, as well as shaders and rendering for skin, eyes, hair, and teeth.
Strand-based Hair Solution
An integrated solution for authoring, importing, simulating, and rendering strand-based hair in Unity.
Frequently asked questions
Firstly, you will need to register for an account with Ziva (it’s free!). Here you can access Ziva Face Trainer. Then, you can use any 3D Software such as Maya, Houdini, and 3ds Max to create a face mesh, as long as that software creates polygons and can be converted into an FBX file. This can then be run through Face Trainer after undergoing the Face Preparation stage (using these instructions).
In order to manipulate your trained Ziva Face in real-time, you will need to download the free Ziva RT Player plugin for Unity (supporting version 2021.3 and above, MacOS not currently supported). This will allow you to deploy and see your deformations in a game-engine environment. There are also Ziva RT Player plugins for Unreal Engine and Maya (supporting 2019, 2020, and 2022 versions).
Ziva Face Trainer is a cloud-based application that enables 3D generalists to automatically generate a VFX-quality facial rig for any characters – from photo realistic to stylized, for games, animation, or visual effects.
You can access your previews in the Preview tab and your Ziva Faces in the Library tab of the Ziva Face Trainer web app (desktop devices only):
https://store.zivadynamics.com/facetrainer
Also, once a preview or training session is completed, you will receive a notification via email, from where you can access the Preview or Library tabs.
You don't have to commit to a training session. Previews are always free so you can make changes to your face mesh and re-upload for another Preview. Every Preview takes about 15 minutes to process and you'll receive an email notification once it's ready to view.
We are working on enabling users to use Ziva Face Trainer while maintaining their own topology, however this is not available at the moment.