METAHUMAN CREATOR

How Epic is upgrading 3D character creation

MetaHuman can export its ‘digital humans’ into Unreal Engine, or as models editable in industrystandard software such as Maya

Epic Games is on the cusp of opening limited early access to MetaHuman Creator, a 3D character-creation tool which has the potential to transform the way character models are produced. The software can rapidly generate unique and extremely high-quality realistic models of people that are fully set up for use in Unreal Engine, where it will be entirely free to use.

“The tool compresses the weeks or months of work it usually takes to create a realistic character into minutes, or however long you wish to put into customising the exact character you want,” Vladimir Mastilovic, vice president of Digital Humans Technology at Epic Games, tells us. “Up until now it has taken very sophisticated teams weeks or months to create just one highquality digital human, and now that massive amount of time and process is being compressed into minutes. That’s new for the entire industry, not just Epic.”

To prove its claims, in February Epic released two sample characters to demonstrate the fidelity of the ‘digital humans’ (as Epic calls them) that MetaHuman Creator can output. The ploy worked. “These characters are crazy good, in terms of skin texture, rigging, and ease of use in the Unreal Engine,” Guillaume Broche, CEO and creative director of new Paris-based developer Sandfall Interactive, says. For him, the quality of the sample characters stand above the typical results that come out of today’s commonly used 3D character creation tools, including Blender, Fuse, and Reallusion’s Character Creator. As you’d expect, models’ character skeletons complement Unreal’s control rig, so they’re immediately available for hand-animation and motion capture directly in the engine.