See the new technology in action.
Epic Games today lifts the lid on MetaHuman Creator – a new tool designed to bring the highest fidelity facial rendering to the development community at large. It is part of Epic’s ongoing mission to democratize cutting-edge graphics technology, giving a wide range of development studios the chance to present characters with the best in the industry and get the most out of current hardware. According to Epic, we’re looking at the kind of facial quality and animation seen in sophisticated titles like The Last of Us Part 2 – and you can see for yourself how close Epic’s technology gets through the video embedded on this page.
MetaHuman Creator takes the form of a browser-based application, connected to the Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming. Vladimir Mastilovic, VP of Digital Humans Technology at Epic told us that the initial process was as simple as a game, with no programming knowledge needed while developers create and sculpt their digital actors – you get a sense of this in the video below. As changes and improvements are made, MetaHuman Creator intelligently uses data from its cloud-based library to extrapolate a realistic digital person. At the end of the process, the final creation can be imported into the Unreal Engine via Quixel Bridge, with complete animation montage and Maya source data provided. At that point, a great degree of rendering customization is available through the features of the Unreal Engine itself – and the data is, of course, compatible with the UE4 and the upcoming UE5.
A look at Epic’s MetaHuman technology in action.
Based on the quality of the sample (and there is another one here, this looks like an impressive display for Epic, although while achieving the fidelity seen in the character rendering found in the first part’s triple A juggernauts, there’s more to the process than just the graphics – performance quality and motion capture will be key, however, we are clearly seeing some cutting edge technology here and these initial demos are impressive. The skin shading, texture quality and geometric density are very impressive, while the eyes look expressive In addition, hair is always a particularly tricky part of rendering compelling characters – but the MHC can exploit the latest wire rendering technology to produce a convincing look, a ‘next generation’ feature that we’ve only seen on proprietary engines, So although it is very demanding to run on anything other than state-of-the-art consoles and systems but state-of-the-art, the MHC can use more standard “plates” for hair rendering. In fact, the system is elf scales its creations to eight LOD levels, ensuring scalability from powerful systems to mobile platforms.
It is still early for the MetaHuman Creator system with a limited number of predefined characters in the cloud to work with, but work continues at an accelerated pace. Epic Games is looking to increase the overall diversity, but also the basic ‘types’ of character – at a press conference, it was recognized that adults are currently the focus and there is much more work to do this, for example, adding children in various stages of development are part of the plan. But Epic is clearly proud of its achievement and eager to share impressive technology, to the point that the company will release two full-character examples for developers to try out, before moving on to an early access program sometime in the coming months.