Exploring the latest developments in one of the leading real-time creation tools

Recent years have seen a huge upsurge in content creators utilising game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine to deliver their work to the public. These engines have put unbelievably powerful tools into the hands of ever yday artists and led to an explosion of highly-rated games, films and visualisation.

This democratisation from developers to content creators shows no signs of stopping, evidenced by Unit y’s acquisition of two major players, bringing both Weta Digital (now Weta FX) and Ziva under their ever- expanding wings. The result of these moves, for ar tists, is that they are gaining access to world-class, industr yproven tools and workflows that would other wise be unat tainable.

By way of example, Wet a’s toolset is world renowned and many ar tists could have only dreamed of accessing those exac t same tools for their own projec ts. The time for dreaming is now over. A new era is dawning, and it seems to be firmly dawning on these global real-time engines like Unit y and Unreal Engine.

© 2021 Unity Technologies

The acquisition of Ziva is another example of this democratisation. By making the computer take the lion’s share of the hard work, Ziva makes it possible for all ar tists, experienced or not, to create game-changing animations.

Its capabilities were showcased in Unit y’s latest demo, Enemies. It builds upon their previous demo The Heretic, released in 2020, which began the work of developing new tools, new pipelines and new tech to enable ar tists to create a new generation of digital humans. At this point, the qualit y of these demos might seem beyond many of us, but what they do, in realit y, is drive for ward the development of power ful, user-accessible tools that enable smaller, non-AAA teams to deliver breathtakingly realistic work.

Unit y’s vision is to make it possible for anyone to create what they want, when they want. It talks about giving content creators superpowers by making a plethora of deep tools available and accessible to ever yone. It is yet to see this vision fully realised, but cer tainly commit ted to it. Let’s take a look at some of the next-gen technology that we’ve already star ted to see, and that we’ll be encountering in the not-too- distant future.