Unreal Engine pushes the boundaries of creating digital characters -apkrig
Three years ago at GDC, Epic Games boasted new Unreal Engine capabilities and suggested that all developers could count on readily available photorealistic graphics as early as 2018. At the time, Tim Sweeney presented what facial animation transmitted in real-time on a photorealistic model, which was used by the expressions of the actor Andy Serkis. It also featured a Siren technology demo, created with the help of Unreal Engine and Cubic Motion, 3Lateral, Vicom or Tencent, resulting in a realistic scene not just with face detail, but with the whole virtual character. And it was at this point that Sweeney mentioned that technology must be available to everyone – from the largest to the smallest – and this initiative will materialize this year in a tool called MetaHuman.
As the developers themselves state on the groundbreaking technology page, creating digital people requires a lot of time, effort and skills that not everyone has, or due to limited resources, cannot hire someone to have these features. Even worse is the situation where you need more photorealistic characters – whether for games or film – and that’s why at Epic Games they thought of an editor with whom everyone could build a model from pre-prepared parts and further customize it to be unique for the project and could be used. Emphasis was placed on ease of use, a wide range of options and hardware requirements, and it must be admitted that the result – at least as the authors present it – makes a literally stunning impression.
There should be over 30 styles of hairstyles, basic clothing or 18 proportions of bodies, and then the whole character, not just the face, will arrive narrated, so animators can continue to work with it and breathe life into the game, film or animation in no time.
The described editor is strikingly similar to the tools with which players create their characters in video games. Use the handles, check boxes and ready-made templates to literally you click desired character, and because we are talking about professional software, you simply export it for use in your project. There should be over 30 styles of hairstyles, basic clothing or 18 proportions of bodies, and then the whole character, not just the face, will arrive narrated, so animators can continue to work with it and breathe life into the game, film or animation in no time. In addition, Epic states that the editor itself will not process anything on your part and that the calculation of the model’s behavior will be handled by the cloud, but on the other hand, this does not mean that you do not need performance to work with the model. However, you can use it for motion capture, thanks to the versatility of basic data, you can change models for models and you can count on several levels of detail (LODs) for final optimization.
As expected, MetaHuman is fully compatible with other modifications in Maya, and the editor can be logically linked to other Epic Games tools. The most frequently mentioned is Live Linke Face for iOS, which only uses the capture of your face converts the animation to a model, in this case created in MetaHuman. Furthermore, Epic Games cooperates in support with ARKit, DI4D, Digital Domain, Dynamixyz, Faceware, JALI, Speech Graphics or Cubic Motion and thus offers a relatively wide range of options for using the model and incorporating it into the project. At the moment, those interested can download the first two test models after logging in and look forward to the introduction of the editor, which should take place later this year. Sure, nicer and more affordable graphics it is not a guarantee of better games, but other people also get a chance to excel, and it is very pleasant to watch as the borders, which seemed insurmountable a few years ago, gradually break down.
