[ad_1]
Epic Games, maker of the Unreal Engine that has powered two decades of triple-A video games, on Wednesday announced another cutting-edge development tool: MetaHuman Creator, an app that can create distinctive and lifelike human characters for video games. in a fraction of the time it currently takes.
“One of the toughest jobs in creating 3D content has been to build truly compelling digital humans,” Vladimir Mastlovic, Epic’s vice president for digital human technology, said in a statement. Epic says the character creation process, which seasoned animators and illustrators spend days or weeks getting done right, can be cut “to less than an hour” by using MetaHuman Creator’s browser-based app. The video above shows the process at work.
“As adjustments are made, MetaHuman Creator mixes between the real-life examples in the library in a plausible and data-limited way,” Epic Games says in its announcement. “Users can choose a starting point by selecting a number of predefined faces to contribute to their human from the range of samples available in the database.”
Role-playing game fans and sports video game career mode enthusiasts know how difficult it is to create a believable avatar, even if they use their own face from cloud-based apps, like GameFace d ‘EA Sports or NBA 2K’s face scan feature. . MetaHuman Creator is a tool for developers, not gamers, but it is possible that we will see the capabilities of this tool filter down to a user’s character creation stage later.
MetaHuman Creator creates a character model that is “fully rigged and ready for animation and motion capture in Unreal Engine,” says Epic Games. Additionally, “Animations created for one MetaHuman will run on other MetaHumans, allowing users to easily reuse a single Performance across multiple Unreal Engine characters or projects.”
Epic says MetaHuman Creator will be available to developers as part of an Early Access trial over the next few months, with a more full launch later.
Unreal Engine 4 has been a free developer tool since 2015. Developers whose games reach a certain revenue threshold donate a percentage of their sales to Epic Games. The big video game makers that use Unreal still negotiate their own licenses and payment structures.
In May 2020, Epic presented a tech demo of the Unreal 5 engine on the PlayStation 5. A full Unreal 5 launch is expected in the second half of this year. Unreal 5 will support games developed for both the current (PS5 and Xbox Series X) and previous generation of consoles, as well as for mobile devices and Windows PCs, and Epic says the developers who make games in Unreal 4 can transfer them to the next engine when it launches.
[ad_2]
Source link