MetaHuman Creator is Epic’s new cloud-streamed app designed to make realistic digital human models. The company promises that the toolkit can reduce the time of the creation to “less than an hour.”
Epic Games unveiled the technology yesterday, sharing a few videos to show what’s their new tool is capable of. MetaHuman Creator works from a browser and is plumbed into Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming.
The company described it as a “cloud-streamed app designed to take real-time digital human creation from weeks or months to less than an hour, without compromising on quality.” As shown in the video below, the toolkit offers a variety of modeling options.
- MetaHuman Creator offers around 30 hairstyles and 18 different body types. Developers will be able to change the character’s face, skin color, and even teeth.
- The asset can be downloaded via Quixel Bridge, ready for animation and motion capture in Unreal Engine.
- Developers can also get access to the source data from a Maya file. It applies to meshes, skeleton, facial rig, materials, etc.
The announcement drew positive reactions online. “And this isn’t even UE5, that fact that it’s the UE4 shows how much is still possible with that engine,” user Jonathan Evans wrote.
Elon Musk was also impressed by MetaHuman Creator, simply writing, “It’s getting real.”
Pairing the MetaHuman Creator with Quixel is incredible but when you couple *that* with the ability to support sculpts *in engine* with UE5 as well as painless Global Illumination this doesn’t just raise the quality of projects: it absolutely crunches the development requirements pic.twitter.com/MOYOQiXN47
— Chris Murphy (@HighlySpammable) February 11, 2021
Who else caught the #MetahumanCreator demo today? It felt like it will be an advanced version of an adobe fuse. Just the though of that alone as a non talented artist got me rock hard. Beautiful detail, fully rigged.. Can not wait to check this out later this year.
— Ryan Saunders (@hulgarth) February 10, 2021
Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator vs. Epic Games’ Unreal character selection. 23 years of progress. Quite a ride. ? pic.twitter.com/REDQvu9Yc2
— Radek (@gamebowski) February 10, 2021
Richard Leadbetter from Digital Foundry called MetaHuman Creator “some cutting edge technology.” He went on to praise the tool’s texture quality, skin shading, and geometric density, as well as “expressive” eyes.
According to Unreal Engine’s official Twitter account, MetaHuman is free for use with the engine, while game developers would only pay 5% royalty “once their games exceed $1M in revenue (per title).”
MetaHuman Creator will be available in early access within the next few months.