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If you are tending to create MetaHumans with motion capture but don’t know how to begin, you’ve come to the right place.
“MetaHumans” is one of the decade’s most popular keywords among animators. It relates to new software and the results it generates: A near-perfect 3D human being that’s ready to be animated.
Animators have already built lifelike human models. However, the typical technique of creating such a high-definition model is time-consuming and costly.
That procedure has been completely transformed by the MetaHuman Creator. They’ve also made it completely free.
You can now use your web browser to construct a one-of-a-kind digital human by adjusting a few sliders. You now have a completely rigged, fully textured human ready for animation, and it renders in real-time thanks to Unreal Engine’s software.
What are MetaHumans with motion capture?
MetaHuman is a comprehensive framework that allows any designer to employ highly realistic human characters in any way they see fit. It comes with MetaHuman Creator, a free cloud-based app that allows you to quickly create fully rigged lifelike digital beings.
A high-end machine with a powerful graphics card is recommended for the MetaHuman sample. This ensures that you have a consistent frame rate and that you can see Unreal Engine’s latest ray-tracing, hair, and motion capture features.
MetaHumans are more than just a collection of elements thrown into Unreal Engine; they’re developed with thought and care to make the building process easier and allow creators to get started quickly.
This virtual human does not exist in the actual world, but it was created using thousands of people’s references. Games, VTubing, virtual production, previz, and movies have all utilized MetaHuman models.
You can make a MetaHuman with your web browser if you don’t have any 3D animation software.
It operates similarly to how you customize a gaming character’s appearance and features with sliders and pickers. The MetaHuman creator goes into great detail, allowing you to customize every aspect of your digital persona. You may sculpt exact facial features, construct various body types, and even select from a (currently limited) selection of clothing and hairstyles.
The tight integration of MetaHumans with the real-time game engine Unreal Engine is a major selling point (Epic Games created both software and has seamlessly integrated them). In minutes, animators can construct a lifelike character that is already wired and ready to animate. Your character is promptly uploaded to Unreal’s cloud-based asset management system, Quixel Bridge.
>>>Read more: Important things to know when implementing Motion Capture with a budget
What can you use MetaHumans with motion capture for?
The only limit to what you can do with MetaHuman’s digital characters is your creativity. Because the software is so new, its usage isn’t properly documented. MetaHumans will be seen by most companies as a tool to speed up character operations.
The following applications can make use of MetaHumans:
- For VTuber live streaming, as realistic human avatars.
- To make it easier to create realistic gaming characters.
- In films or video games, create unique background characters (e.g., crowd simulation).
- For virtual productions that necessitate the use of digital persons in real-time.
When paired with motion capture technology, however, a MetaHuman truly starts to shine. Even when it comes to outlandish beings like aliens, genuine actors’ performances may be astonishingly lifelike.
>>>Read more: Pros and Cons of Motion capture? The development of Motion capture Asia
MetaHuman uses in the game industry
MetaHumans comes with everything you need to design game characters, as you’d expect from software developed by a gaming studio. When you’re ready to export, you have multiple levels of detail (LOD) to choose from. However, games have two major limitations:
- You can’t let gamers create their own unique character with MetaHumans; instead, you’ll have to manually include character-development features like scars.
- MetaHumans allows small teams and indie game creators to skip character modeling, texturing, and rigging. MetaHumans is a great alternative to purchasing models on asset marketplaces because it is free software. Larger studios will either have to manually integrate bespoke elements or use the MetaHuman models exclusively for non-player (NPC) characters.
MetaHuman uses in the TV and film industry
MetaHumans aren’t nearly lifelike enough to be used as pixel-perfect digital doubles, and the uncanny valley effect still exists. While this is expected to change in the next years, the software can still be utilized to improve workflow right now. In the past, modelers, texture artists, riggers, and effects artists would have to spend days creating a similar model in Autodesk Maya to obtain a similar aesthetic.
MetaHumans, when combined with motion capture, could be used to generate far more than just background characters in the future. You may considerably improve the efficiency of previz projects, introduce pixel-perfect stunt doubles, and more by making digital doubles.
>>>Read more:
- Motion Capture for Games: Planning and Direction (Part 1)
- Motion Capture for Games: Planning and Direction (Part 2)
- Motion Capture for Games: Planning and Direction (Part 3)
How to animate your MetaHumans with motion capture?
In any animation production, motion capture and MetaHumans are the ultimate time saves. Both are new technologies that make body and facial animation more efficient, simple, and high-quality.
Motion capture (also known as mocap) is the process of capturing a person’s movements as animation data and then applying it to a 3D model. Mocap is a real-time animation technique that works well for both classic animation and newer virtual production projects.
You’ll need a motion capture suit, a finger tracking solution, and a facial tracker to fully capture your MetaHuman’s performance. We make use of below motion capture kit:
- Smart suit Pro for full-body performance capture
- Finger-tracking smart gloves
- Face capture software
MetaHumans are set up to be driven using full MetaHuman body and facial motion-capture data that is transmitted in real-time into Unreal Engine utilizing the Live Link plugin for a DCC application (like Motionbuilder or Maya) and the Live Link Face software to record data.
The MetaHuman’s Animation Blueprint gets all of the essential data and routes it to the appropriate skeleton. The character’s existing MetaHuman Blueprint can then receive and utilize the data from the Animation Blueprint, as well as be controlled by incoming motion capture data via Live Link.
Select the Skeletal Mesh component called Body in your MetaHuman and change the Animation Mode to Use Animation Blueprint in the Details panel.
Add a LiveLink Skeletal Animation Component to your Components list if you want your animation to change in real-time without needing to enable Simulation mode in the editor. This allows you to change the staging and arrangement of a live subject without having to wait for the simulation to accept animation data.
Future Improvements for MetaHumans
For Unreal Engine projects that use the MetaHuman Creator, MetaHumans represent the future of character generation. The following is a partial list of enhancements to Unreal Engine and, by extension, MetaHumans that are currently being made.
- MetaHumans does not currently support Vulkan.
- MetaHumans’ quality on iOS, Android, and Switch will continue to improve. Skin material characteristics (such as dynamic maps), geometric detail, and hair attachment are all included.
- It is costly to use the Pose Driver setup on the Body component. This mechanism will receive numerous optimizations in Unreal Engine 4.26. There are two hotfixes and version 4.27.
- Groom components are more expensive to employ due to the lack of binding and simulation scaling with LODs.
- On Mac, hair simulation is turned off. This is a platform-specific issue that has to be looked at further.
- On the XSX, there is a hair shadowing flicker that will be fixed in the Unreal Engine 4.26.2 update.
- On the Nintendo Switch, hair shading appears black. This problem will be addressed in Unreal Engine 4.27.
- At UV seams or seams between chunks formed by the Compat.MAX GPUSKIN BONES option, the Recompute Tangent functionality may create non-matching normals.
Conclusion
You can use MetaHumans with motion capture in your own projects. Through Live Link, real-time Motion Capture UE4 data can be used to drive animations. Managing the degrees of detail for numerous assets can support both high-end and low-end hardware and platforms.
In an intuitive and simple-to-learn environment, the MetaHuman Creator allows you to construct your own digital human representations. Many parts of your MetaHumans can be customized, including MetaHuman facial features, hairstyles, body types, and more.
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Animost – Vietnam 3D Animation Studio
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