Of course. Ziva VFX comes with built-in demos. These demos are fully self-contained Maya scenes and scripts. You can find them in the Ziva Tools menu. The purpose of these demos is to give simple working examples that showcase the features of Ziva VFX. We hope that the TDs will be able to then expand these examples as needed in their work.
For example, launch the Ziva Tools → Run Demo → Anatomical Arm.
This arm demo demonstrates a basic human upper arm scene. You can then press “Play” and the solver will start computing the muscle deformations. The bone motion is keyframed and the Ziva solver solves for the muscle motion. The muscles are setup to fire as the elbow bends.
Launching the built-in anatomical arm demo.
View Demo Assets and Scripts
These built-in demos are a great learning tool because you can see the complete sequence of MEL commands to make the demo.
Go to the demos folder in the ZivaVFX installation path. This folder contains the demo assets, including Maya scene files, textures and MEL scripts.
For example, if ZivaVFX is installed at C:\Program Files\Ziva\VFX, the demos can be found in C:\Program Files\Ziva\VFX\Ziva-VFX-Maya-Module\ZivaVFX-Maya-<VERSION_NUMBER>\demos folder.
This folder is also printed into the Maya Script Editor after you launch the demo from the Ziva Tools menu. The most relevant code can be found in the “main” procedure of each demo’s MEL script files.
If you look at this MEL code, you will see that it is extensively commented, teaching you how to set up the Ziva scene by yourself.
Everything in Ziva VFX is scriptable. Actually, all the ziva commands are Maya commands, so you can call them in the same way as every other Maya command, either from MEL or Python.
Note that the source code contains long arrays specifying the various paint maps. This is needed to make the demos self-contained. In practice, however, the maps are painted interactively by the artists and there is no need to store them in such a way (and this is how we made the maps for these demos: we painted them interactively, then read them from the Maya plugs and converted them to MEL source code).
Our plugin offers two ways to save the Ziva rig, including the painted maps: Maya Save command and zBuilder.