Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine that powered two decades of triple-A video games, on Wednesday announced a leading development tool: MetaHuman Creator, an application that features distinctive and lifelike human characters for video games in a fraction of the time it takes. currently taking.
“One of the most difficult tasks in creating 3D content is constructing truly compelling digital people,” said Vladimir Mastlovic, Epic’s Vice President for Digital Humans Technology, in a statement. Epic says that the creative process, which takes seasoned animators and illustrators days or weeks to get right, can be reduced to ‘less than an hour’ using MetaHuman Creator’s browser-based application. The video above shows the process at work.
“As adjustments are made, MetaHuman Creator mixes in a plausible, data-limited way between actual examples in the library,” Epic Games said in its announcement. “Users can select a starting point by selecting a number of predefined faces to contribute to their human from the range of samples available in the database.”
Role-playing players and lovers of sports video games career mode know how difficult it is to construct a credible avatar, even if they use 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 for gamers, but we’ll probably see the features of this tool later.
MetaHuman Creator builds a character model that is ‘fully equipped and ready for animation and motion capture in Unreal Engine’, says Epic Games. In addition, “animations created for one MetaHuman will run on other MetaHumans, enabling users to easily reuse a single performance in different Unreal Engine characters or projects.”
Epic says MetaHuman Creator will be available to developers in an early access trial in the next few months, with a fuller launch coming later.
Unreal Engine 4 has been a free development tool since 2015. Developers whose games reach a certain revenue threshold give Epic Games a percentage of their sales. Larger video game makers using Unreal are still negotiating 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 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 previous, as well as mobile devices and Windows computers, and Epic says developers making games in Unreal 4 can send them to the next engine when it starts.