Epic Games Lets You Easily Create Digital Humans In Your Browser With New Tool
Video screenshot via Unreal Engine
What if you could design photorealistic characters as easily as on The Sims? Epic Games, developer of games such as Fortnite, Unreal, and Infinity Blade, is making this attainable for the masses with a new facial rendering app called MetaHuman Creator.
Typically, to be able to create high-fidelity, real-time digital humans, you’d require a crew of tech artists, expensive equipment, and months of research. Epic Games says all these steps are eliminated in the MetaHuman Creator, a browser app designed for the larger development community.
The app, powered by Epic’s commercially-available game engine Unreal Engine, will let budding game designers construct bespoke, high-fidelity and scalable digital humans, with options to manipulate facial features, hairstyles, skin complexions, teeth, body types, clothing, and more. Real-time characters can be completed in “under an hour,” a smidge as compared to the usual months-long process.
When they’re satisfied with the results, users can export and download the character designs to be animated in Unreal Engine.
“Imagine game characters that will blow your players’ minds, digital doubles on the latest virtual production set that will stand up to close-up shots, virtual participants in immersive training scenarios you can’t tell from the real thing: the possibilities for creators are limitless,” the company teased.
The app is still in its premature stages, though Epic Games says an Early Access program to test-drive the tool should arrive “within the next few months.” For now, you can experiment with two high-quality sample characters for a gauge of how well the MetaHuman Creator will work.
[via EuroGamer, videos and cover image via Unreal Engine]
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