Mind-blown, MetaHumans Creator from Epic and Unreal Engine is next generation.
So if you have been keeping a close eye at Epic and the work they are doing with Unreal Engine, you might have seen that they are working on creating real-time MetaHumans. Some of the work can be seen on their CGI characters Senua (Hellblade II) and Siren. They have also done digital twins of Andy Serkis and Mike Seymour. These where done a while back, and they are what you could expect, not perfect, but still impressive.
Fast forward to today, and this year 2021, this is what we got. Nothing short of mind blowing.
Companies like 3Lateral and Cubic Motion have led the field in creating performance capture-driven 4D animation. Epic has acquired both of these companies and they are now part of the Epic family.
MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed app. This means you can probably create these humans more or less on any device without the need for a massive onboard graphics card.
This is usually a very time consuming task to digitise a human. Could be weeks or even months worth of work. With MetaHuman Creator this will only be a couple of hours tops.
We are moving closer to a reality where we all can have digital twins or avatars to represent us not only in VR/AR but all places where digital form is superior to real form.
If this is whats doable today, in 2021. I’m very bullish about where we will be in 2025. The lines between real and unreal will start to blend beyond recognition. To think that during my life-time we’ve gone from Pong, essentially a couple of rectangles on a screen, to this. Is really hard to wrap my head around.
Where will we be in 100 years? Where will we be in 1000 years?
The MetaHumans are fully rigged, as you can spot in the video above. I would love to jump into VR and animate this directly there. Or use mo-cap or the iOS app to use the LiDAR to animate the face in real-time.
If you are interested in this space, I suggest you start by following Unreal Engine and look at the example code they have made available on their blog.
Also have a look at my post about Unreal Engine 5.
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Thanks for reading.
