Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine that has powered two decades of triple-A video games, announced another leading development tool on Wednesday: MetaHuman Creator, an application that can create distinctive and lifelike human characters for video games in a fraction of the time it takes. it currently costs.
“One of the most difficult tasks in creating 3D content is to construct truly compelling digital people,” Vladimir Mastlovic, Epic’s vice president for Digital Humans Technology said in a statement. Epic says the character creation process, which seasoned animators and illustrators spend days or weeks getting it right, can be cut to “less than an hour” with MetaHuman Creator’s browser-based application. The video above shows the process at work.
“While adjustments are made, MetaHuman Creator mixes in a plausible, data-limited way between actual samples in the library,” said Epic Games in its announcement. “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.”
Role-playing fans and sports video game career mode enthusiasts know how difficult it is to construct a believable avatar, even when using their own face from cloud-based applications, such as EA Sports’ GameFace or NBA 2K’s face scanning feature. MetaHuman Creator is a tool for developers, not players, but it is possible that we will see the capabilities of this tool back to the character creation stage later on.
MetaHuman Creator is building a character model that is “fully rigged and ready for animation and motion capture in Unreal Engine,” said Epic Games. In addition, “animations created for one MetaHuman can also be run on other MetaHumans, allowing users to easily reuse a single show for multiple Unreal Engine characters or projects.”
Epic says MetaHuman Creator will be available to developers in an early access trial version in the coming months, with a fuller launch later.
Unreal Engine 4 has been a free development tool since 2015. Developers whose games have reached a certain revenue threshold give Epic Games a percentage of their revenue. Larger video game makers using Unreal are still negotiating their own licensing and payment structures.
In May 2020, Epic showed a technical demonstration of the Unreal 5 engine on the PlayStation 5. A full launch of Unreal 5 is expected sometime in the second half of this year. Unreal 5 supports games developed for both the current console generation (PS5 and Xbox Series X) and the previous, as well as mobile devices and Windows PCs, and Epic says developers who create games in Unreal 4 can transfer them to the next engine when it is launched.