Epic releases new MetaHuman Creator tool to help developers create digital humans in an hour

Epic Games just revealed a new browser-based software tool powered by its Unreal Engine titled the MetaHuman Creator. The new app empowers games developers and creators to craft highly realistic human faces and help power more realistic body movements and facial animations.

The tool is said to be able to help game developers to slash the time it takes to create digital humans from weeks or months to less than an hour, "while maintaining the highest level of quality." The MetaHuman Creator runs in the cloud via Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming.

Vladimir Mastilovic, VP, Digital Humans Technology at Epic Games, said; "Up until now one of the most arduous tasks in 3D content creation has been constructing truly convincing digital humans. Even the most experienced artists require significant amounts of time, effort, and equipment, just for one character. After decades of research and development, and thanks to bringing companies like 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, and Quixel into the Epic family, that barrier is being erased through Unreal Engine, and we're thrilled to introduce MetaHuman Creator."

Apart from speeding up the process of creating digital humans, it also enables developers to scale and make many types of characters more easily. Epic says that the tool can be used in conjunction with modern motion capture and animation techniques for creating realistic movements and human interactions for scenes built for games on next-gen platforms and high-end virtual production.

According to Epic, Unreal Engine users can animate the digital human asset using a range of performance capture tools, including – Unreal Engine's Live Link Face iOS app, Faceware, JALI Inc., Speech Graphics, Dynamixyz, DI4D, Digital Domain, and Cubic Motion solutions – or keyframe it manually. Epic is also currently working with vendors on providing support for ARKit.

Epic is also releasing two fully finished sample characters to explore, modify, and use in projects running on Unreal Engine 4.26.1 and later. Epic has not provided details on when it intends to release the MetaHuman Creator, although interested artists and developers can sign up for updates on the Unreal Engine website.