Epic’s new MetaHuman Creator offers ultra-realistic digital actors • Eurogamer.net



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See new technology in action.

Epic Games today lifts the lid on MetaHuman Creator – a new tool designed to bring the highest fidelity facial rendering to the wider development community. It’s part of Epic’s continued mission to democratize high-end graphics technology, giving a wider range of development studios the ability to deliver characters with the best in the industry and get the most out of the game. material today. According to Epic, we’re taking a look at the kind of facial and animation quality seen in high-end titles like The Last of Us Part 2 – and you can see for yourself how close Epic’s technology is to video. integrated on this page.

MetaHuman Creator takes the form of a browser-based application, integrated with Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming. Vladimir Mastilovic, vice president of digital humans technology at Epic, told us the initial process was as easy as playing a game, with no programming knowledge required when developers create and sculpt their digital actors – you have one. idea in the video below. As changes and improvements are made, MetaHuman Creator intelligently uses data from its cloud-based library to extrapolate a realistic digital person. At the end of the process, the final creation can be imported into Unreal Engine via Quixel Bridge, with full animation and Maya source data provided. At this point, a massive degree of rendering customization is available through the features of Unreal Engine itself – and the data is, of course, compatible with the UE4 and the upcoming UE5.

A glimpse of Epic’s MetaHuman technology in action.

Based on the sample quality (and there’s another one here, it looks like an impressive performance for Epic, albeit achieving the fidelity seen in the character rendering found in the triple-A behemoths of Part one, there’s more to the process than just graphics – the quality of performance and motion capture will be key. However, we clearly see some cutting edge technology here and these initial demos are striking. skin, texture quality and geometric density are very impressive, while the eyes appear In addition, hair is always a particularly delicate part of rendering convincing characters – but MHC can harness the very latest in strand rendering technology to produce a compelling look, a “ next-gen ” feature that we’ve only really seen on proprietary engines. Although probably too demanding to run on au Being something more than new generation consoles and high-end systems, MHC can fall back on more standard texture “maps” for hair rendering. elf extends its creations to eight levels of level of detail, ensuring scalability from powerful systems to mobile platforms.

It’s still early days for the MetaHuman Creator system with a limited number of cloud-based predefined characters to work with, but the work continues at a steady pace. Epic Games is looking to increase the overall diversity, but also the base character “ types ” – during a press briefing it was acknowledged that adults are currently the focus and that there are many more work to be done, for example, adding children at different stages of development is part of the plan. But Epic is clearly proud of its accomplishment and keen to share awesome tech, to the point where the company will release two full character examples for developers to experience, before moving on to an Early Access program at some point in the year. the next months. .



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