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VIDEO GAME CHARACTERS Just got Unreal - Metahuman Creator!

Matt_Fox

Member
MetaHuman Creator: High-Fidelity Digital Humans Made Easy | Unreal Engine - YouTube


From Unreal: "Bringing compelling real-time digital humans to life is incredibly challenging and time-consuming. It can take months of research, costly scanning equipment, and an army of tech artists. What if we could make the process radically simpler, faster, and more scalable—without compromising on quality?"

"MetaHuman Creator sets a new benchmark for both the believability of digital humans, and also for the ease of creating them. You can directly manipulate facial features, adjust skin complexion, and select from preset body types, hairstyles, clothing, and more. You can even edit your character’s teeth!"

"We’re excited to share a sneak peek at MetaHuman Creator, a new tool that will empower anyone to create a bespoke photorealistic digital human, fully rigged and complete with hair and clothing, in a matter of minutes."

"MetaHuman Creator gives you fast, easy, scalable creation of digital humans of the highest possible quality. It will be ready for test-driving as part of an Early Access program within the next few months."
 
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Interfectum

Member
Keanu Reeves GIF
 

Croatoan

They/Them A-10 Warthog
As a programmer this is awesome!

Epic is going after that Daz Studio crowd and helping indie devs? Love Epic.

Here is hoping they let marketplace devs make morphs/clothes and stuff for it so the library expands exponentially. Yall don't know how big of a deal this is for idie devs. You will start to see lower budget games with decent characters!
 
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nkarafo

Member
Future actors will only be useful for providing the rights to use their likeness. Pretty sure even their voice will be able to be re-produced.

Maybe those Ghostbusters 3 of Back to the Future 4 movies with the original cast doesn't seem impossible anymore.
 

Zeeed

Member
As a programmer this is awesome!

Epic is going after that Daz Studio crowd and helping indie devs? Love Epic.

Here is hoping they let marketplace devs make morphs/clothes and stuff for it so the library expands exponentially. Yall don't know how big of a deal this is for idie devs. You will start to see lower budget games with decent characters!

Not sure if you have seen these before, but it is pretty cool:
 

SirTerry-T

Member
i saw this pop up this morning and all i could think of was this from 11 yrs ago. Impressed in 2010, not so much today.


That was just animated albedo, surface and normal maps over very simple geometry. Very good for what it was out to achieve but no use at all for anything custom.
 

Matt_Fox

Member
LA Noire cost $50 million to make and back in 2011 that made it one of the most expensive video games of all time, what's most impressive about this Metahuman software is low cost / fast creation.
 
That's the best character creator so far! Very cool stuff, the Asian dude looked the most "real" for whatever reason. The close up of the ladies lips as she talked, that was impressive!

Now... on to the real question, when will the first game with this kind of detail be released and on what? Next gen nVidia/AMD cards and NextGen consoles (maybe).
 

01011001

Banned
i saw this pop up this morning and all i could think of was this from 11 yrs ago. Impressed in 2010, not so much today.



this is still the best face animations out there. the issue is that you have to record the face and the body completely separately and this results in really awkward looking moments in actual cutscenes.
if you only have the face and you don't see the body. this is still as realistic as it gets because it basically creates an animated texture that is almost a direct 1 to 1 capture of someone's face.

with other face animation techniques be it procedural or complete motion capturing, you still see that the movement of muscles and stuff is not real, it usually seems overly smoothed over or when edited by hand you can tell that as well.
 

ShadowLag

Member
Looks neat, but I hope it has the option to produce non-photo-realistic characters for more stylized games as well. Also, what happens when you're at the mercy of only X amount of selectable hairstyles for example? Are they just preset assets stuck to the head, or can they be fully constructed within the editor as well? I can imagine a world where every indie game is using the same 5-6 hair styles and all the characters look the same, much like the droves of Unity asset flip games of today.
 

skit_data

Member
I was just about to post their twitter post on MetaPets, but realized now that it was an Aprils fools joke. Fooled two weeks later, shame on me.
 

Alright

Banned
Could this tech be used to bring ancient faces to life? Like from statues, busts and death-masks?

How long until someone makes Hitler?
 

8BiTw0LF

Banned





Notes: - No facial capture, so I could have better freedom to move - Loin Cloth physics cloth didn't have anything to collide with when my legs are spread, so it clips through the lower skirt - Stock Unreal Engine 4.27 APEC cloth simulation, will start testing Chaos Cloth next - Lower Arm collisions not tuned large enough, so the MetaHuman arm clips through - MetaHuman neck retarget/solve is still weird and long Body Motion Capture System: Vicon - 10x Vero Cameras Workstation 1 (Vicon Shogun and Unreal Engine) HP Z8 - Dual Intel Xeon Gold - Nvidia A6000 Recording Workstation (OBS) Custom PC - AMD 1950x - Nvidia 2080ti Elgato 4K60 Pro
 

SirTerry-T

Member
The professional part of me loves this stuff and what it can achieve from a technical viewpoint but the artist in me is worried that personal expression, style and individuality is rapidly becoming a footnote where AAA game production is concerned.
 

mortal

Gold Member
The professional part of me loves this stuff and what it can achieve from a technical viewpoint but the artist in me is worried that personal expression, style and individuality is rapidly becoming a footnote where AAA game production is concerned.
It's another creative tool at the end of the day much like the Unreal engine itself. The art still has to come from the person/people.
 
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8BiTw0LF

Banned
It's another creative tool at the end of the day much like the Unreal engine itself. The art still has to come from the person/people.
It really looks like metahuman is the perfect tool for amateurs and small indie studios.
I can understand why AAA studios who are struggling with their old (modernized) engines could feel like they're slowly getting behind "free" tools that are easy to use.
Seems like we're in a structural revolution in gaming. Let's wait and see what happens in the next couple of years.
 
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