METAHUMAN CREATOR | QUIXEL BRIDGE
BUILD PHOTOREAL HUMANS WITH EPIC’S LATEST TOOL
Discover how to generate incredible CG human characters for your projects with MetaHuman Creator
AUTHOR Rob Redman
3D World editor Rob is a 3D artist and animator with over 20 years’ experience, plays guitar, and is a serial beard grower. pariahstudios.co.uk
Creating humans has long been the holy grail for CG artists. It’s a task that has always been seen as difficult and time-consuming, partly because the end result isn’t just about the geometry, or the materials and lighting, or the rigging and posing. It is all those things, but a believable human is definitely far more than just the sum of its CG parts.
Epic saw this problem and introduced the MetaHuman Creator software, an online tool for generating photorealistic human characters for use not just in its own Unreal Engine, but in other 3D apps too (currently only Maya is supported, but expect others later).
The tools are really quite simple to use, with a similar feature set to other character creation software, but the results are a step ahead of anything else you might have tried. The blending tools let you take pre-existing characters and morph between them. This isn’t restricted in any way so creating characters based on different statures, ethnicities and genders is both fun and rewarding.