Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine that powered two decades of AAA video games, on Wednesday announced another cutting-edge development tool: MetaHuman Creator, an application that can create distinctive and realistic human characters for video games in a fraction of the time it takes. at the moment.
“One of the most arduous tasks in creating 3D content was to build truly compelling digital humans,” said Vladimir Mastlovic, vice president of Digital Human Technology at Epic, in a statement. Epic says the character creation process, which experienced animators and illustrators spend days or weeks getting it right, can be reduced “to less than an hour” using the browser-based application MetaHuman Creator. The video above shows the process in operation.
“As adjustments are made, MetaHuman Creator combines real-world examples in the library in a plausible and data-constrained way,” says Epic Games in its announcement. “Users can choose a starting point by selecting a series of predefined faces to contribute to their human from a variety of samples available in the database.”
RPG game fans and sports video game career enthusiasts know how difficult it is to build a trusted avatar, even if they are using their own face in cloud-based applications such as EA Sports GameFace or the NBA 2K facial scanning feature . MetaHuman Creator is a tool for developers, not players, but it is possible that we will see the features of this tool filter down to the user’s character creation stage later.
MetaHuman Creator builds a character model that is “fully equipped and ready for animation and motion capture on Unreal Engine,” says Epic Games. In addition, “animations created for one MetaHuman will be executed in other MetaHumans, allowing users to easily reuse a single performance on various Unreal Engine characters or projects”.
Epic says MetaHuman Creator will be available to developers in an early access test in the coming months, with a full release coming later.
Unreal Engine 4 has been a free development tool since 2015. Developers whose games reach a certain revenue limit give Epic Games a percentage of their sales. The biggest video game makers that use Unreal still negotiate their own licenses and payment structures.
In May 2020, Epic showed a technical demonstration of the Unreal 5 engine on the PlayStation 5. A full release of Unreal 5 is expected sometime in the second half of this year. Unreal 5 will support games developed for the current console generation (PS5 and Xbox Series X) and the previous one, as well as mobile devices and Windows PCs, and Epic says developers who make games in Unreal 4 can download them to the next engine when it starts.