MetaHuman Creator by Epic
Epic Games, the creators of the unreal engine which have been used in video games and television shows such as The Mandalorian have developed a new tool to create realistic characters. The MetaHuman Creator powered Unreal Engine enables creators to create realistic human proportions and facial animations.
Why was the MetaHuman Creator Created?
The main aim of the MetaHuman Creator is to reduce studio time in creating and rigging realistic-looking humans which often take weeks or months to develop. Often this process would involve research, scanning faces, and video effects artists to build real human character models. The MetaHuman Creator cuts time and saves money on character creation to allow studios to focus more time on game and story development.
What Can The MetaHuman Creator Do?
The tool offers a lot of customisation from wrinkles, hair texture, to body shape to create realistic character models. Powered by the Unreal Engine, character model skins and textures will react to the lighting environment more realistically. Once these characters are created, the character models can be used with motion capture data and be transferred across different projects.
Summary
The MetaHuman Creator will help game developers to speed up character model development and free up more time to develop storages or gameplay experience. The tool can be used during early development of games to see how characters interact with the environment. With the technology accessible via a browser, characters’ model development does not require a high-end computer. There could be outside uses of this character model tool such as helping the police create character mockups of suspects from witness descriptions. By enabling to build a more realistic character profile may help the public to identify a suspect easier. Epic plans to release the product at some point in 2021.