Creating realistic human characters with natural behaviors takes a lot of work on the part of developers. Even with a lot of experience, imagining the look, working on the animations, modeling the whole thing and making everything believable takes a lot of time.
This is the time that Epic Games wants to tackle, which we talk a lot about for its purchasing platform or for Fortnite, but who is first a company developing 3D engines. While Unreal Engine 5 is at the doors of the studios, the company of Tim Sweeney indicates that the companies 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, specialists in the creation of animations in 4D have joined the Epic family.
Together, they unveil MetaHuman Creator, a creation tool whose goal is to save a lot of time to developers. And as much to say that Epic Games’s promise is huge: go from weeks or less to less than an hour, without sacrificing the quality of the rendering. Expected to be tested in the coming months, the software will allow users to draw in a large library, brought to grow, elements composing a human body and animations.
The advantage presented by Epic is that MetaHumans Creator automatically adapts the assembly according to the various modifications made. Obviously, the creators will be able to start from various archetypes in order to have a working basis. In his press release, Epic Games declares that there will initially be about thirty different hairstyles, clothes, or even 18 types of bodies of varying proportions.
Once the creation is complete, it will be possible to download it via Quixel Bridge, and it will be ready for animation and motion capture via the Unreal Engine. For those who are wondering, a Maya file will also be sent to developers, and it will include mesh, controls, materials, and skeleton. Backward compatibility of the animations is also planned, allowing developers to reuse them in other projects using MetaHumans.