Epic Games dropped some features update of the new MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine. You can alter face characteristics, adjust skin color, edit teeth, and choose from a variety of body types, hairstyles, clothing, and other options with MetaHuman Creator. When you’ve finished your character, you may export and download it in Unreal Engine, rigged and ready for animation.
What is MetaHuman Creator of Unreal Engine?
From Cyberpunk 2077 to Dark Souls, character creation tools have been a standard in video games for a long time. Epic Games, based in North Carolina, teased the next generation of customized software.
The tool, known as MetaHuman Creator, is a cloud-based computer app that the company says can cut the time it takes developers to generate “real-time digital humans” from weeks to under an hour, resulting in some uncannily life-like virtual individuals.
Epic released a number of films demonstrating MetaHuman Creator in action. Unreal Engine, an industry-leading game creation software, sits at the heart of everything.
MetaHuman is free to use with Unreal Engine, according to Epic. “Game developers only pay a 5% royalty after their titles exceed $1 million in revenue,” it claimed in a tweet.
MetaHuman Creator, according to Epic, uses an “ever-growing library of variants of human appearance and motion” to allow game makers to sculpt every feature of a digital avatar, from facial wrinkles to brow structure to eye hues.
Anyone who has spent hours trying to mimic a human’s resemblance in video games will be familiar with the general concept, but the output quality and overall fluidity of workflow appear to be designed for teams working on next-generation platforms.
>>>Read more: Why is Epic Games so concerned about protecting Unreal Engine?
What are the new features that are coming in the MetaHuman Creator?
Cloud-based applications now have new functionality. MetaHuman Creator allows users to quickly create photorealistic digital humans with hair and clothing; plugin features support UE5’s new character rigging, animation, and physics features.
Compatibility with Unreal Engine 5’s new character tools
Mesh to MetaHuman
Mesh to MetaHuman, the first significant feature of the new MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine, allows you to convert your own custom facial mesh into a MetaHuman that is completely rigged and ready to animate. In MetaHuman Creator, you can fine-tune your character even further.
Mesh to MetaHuman starts with a textured mesh built with scanning, sculpting, or traditional modeling tools, and uses automatic landmark tracking in UE5 to fit our MetaHuman topology template to it, combining it with a body type from the MetaHuman options. This templated mesh is then sent to the cloud, where it is matched to a MetaHuman from our database that is the best fit.
Now that you’ve converted your mesh into a MetaHuman, you can download it or open it in MetaHuman Creator to play with the animations and see it come to life, as well as continue to adjust and improve it.
While some components, such as hair and skin textures, will need to be reauthored or reapplied in MetaHuman Creator or the tool of your choice, Model to MetaHuman allows you to quickly create a fully rigged digital human from your static mesh. That’s a fantastic prospect!
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Control Rig
With this version, you may use all of Unreal Engine 5’s new character rigging and animation features, including artist-friendly authoring and retargeting toolsets, with your MetaHumans.
Control Rig, Unreal Engine’s built-in rigging system, allows you to quickly and easily design rigs and distribute them across numerous characters. MetaHumans is developed on top of the Control Rig.
Control Rig is now production-ready in UE5 and includes a number of new features, including Space Switching, which allows you to dynamically reparent your Controls to suit different situations.
Control Rig is linked with Sequencer, allowing you to animate your characters as well as store and apply poses using the new Pose Tool, which includes a number of additional facial poses that have also been included in MetaHuman Creator—read on for more information.
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IK rigs
In addition, UE5 has an entirely new set of artist-friendly tools for retargeting animations. Because MetaHumans are equipped with IK rigs, they can take full use of this.
You may quickly, efficiently, and reliably transfer animations between all MetaHumans and other characters with IK Retargeter, even if their body proportions differ. MetaHumans are now compatible with both UE4 and UE5 mannequins, allowing you to use the Unreal Engine Marketplace’s thousands of existing animations.
For example, you could easily replace the mannequins in the Lyra Starter Game with your MetaHumans with a few mouse clicks.
IK Rig allows you to define posture editing solvers and goals for your skeletal models interactively. Adjusting a character additively while retaining the present animation is a popular use case, such as having your MetaHuman always glance at a specific target while strolling along.
MetaHumans ship with active ragdoll physics, as Chaos is now the default physics engine in UE5. They’ll aim for convincing positions and even strive to protect their heads when tumbling! In the MetaHuman Sample project, Epic game has also created a new level that shows how to use the new physics materials and ‘get up’ animations with your Unreal Engine project.
Finally, because Quixel Bridge is now integrated into the Unreal Editor, integrating MetaHumans into your UE5 projects is as simple as clicking a few buttons. All of this translates to more realistic real-time animated characters in less time.
>>>Read more: Unreal Engine 5 – What you should know
New features for MetaHuman Creator
New facial animation loops
You’ll benefit from several interesting and useful new features in MetaHuman Creator, whether you’re improving your current unique MetaHumans or creating new ones from scratch.
To begin, there are 10 new facial animation loops that you can utilize to bring your work to life quickly. These are useful for testing how well your character’s deformations operate with various expressions without having to download the character first.
Body poses
Six new body poses (anything from being caught in the middle of a high hurdle to trying out a modern dance move) and five new facial poses (everything from being caught in the middle of a high hurdle to trying out a contemporary dance move) are included with the same objective.
Clothing options
If you don’t want your characters to blend in with the MetaHuman crowd, more clothing options, such as the ability to alter the colors of sections inside fabric patterns like polka dots, stripes, or paisleys, will be appreciated.
Hairdos
Finally, Epic Game has introduced 13 new hairdos, as well as additional kinds of beards, mustaches, eyebrows, and eyelashes, for a total of 23 new grooms, to give you more flexibility and diversity over your characters’ hair.
With the Ombré and Highlights capabilities, as well as the ability to color different portions of the Mohawk, Faux Mohawk, and Pulled Back styles separately, you can further modify their hues. These options, when combined, give you a whole new set of looks for your MetaHumans.
Additional lighting presets
Epic Game released six lightings presets from MetaHuman Creator, designed by award-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser, for use in Unreal Engine a few months ago.
With the three lighting settings produced for The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, we’re now adding to that collection. The original six settings have also been updated to work with UE5. The revised lighting set is available for download from the Marketplace.
Above is some information about some new features of MetaHuman Creator of Unreal Engine. If you have any questions, please comment down below!
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