Epic Games on Thursday unveiled MetaHuman Creator, a new browser-based tool that empowers game developers and creators of real-time 3D content to slash the time it takes to build digital humans from weeks or months to less than an hour.
MetaHuman Creator runs in the Cloud via Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming.
In addition to speeding up the complex process of digital human creation, it also enables teams of all shapes and sizes to more easily scale and make many types of characters to meet the demands of next-gen platforms and high-end virtual production.
"Up until now one of the most arduous tasks in 3D content creation has been constructing truly convincing digital humans. Even the most experienced artists require significant amounts of time, effort, and equipment, just for one character," Vladimir Mastilovic, VP, Digital Humans Technology at Epic Games said in a statement.
MetaHuman Creator enables users to easily create new characters through intuitive workflows that let them sculpt and craft results as desired.
As adjustments are made, MetaHuman Creator blends actual examples in the library in a plausible, data-constrained way.
Users can choose a starting point by selecting a number of preset faces to contribute to their human from the range of samples available in the database.
According to the company, once in Unreal Engine, users can animate the digital human asset using a range of performance capture tools—they can use Unreal Engine's Live Link Face iOS app, and Epic is also currently working with vendors on providing support for ARKit, Faceware, JALI, Speech Graphics, Dynamixyz, DI4D, Digital Domain, and Cubic Motion solutions—or keyframe it manually.
In addition, to illustrate the quality of the digital humans made possible with MetaHuman Creator, Epic is releasing two fully finished sample characters available to explore, modify, and use in projects running on Unreal Engine 4.26.1 and later.
