Epic Games has released a new software called the MetaHuman Creator, a tool for creating what it calls “digital humans.” You can check out its promotional videos, which star the aforementioned beings. They look very realistic, if not a little unsettling.
The MetaHuman Creator is an app that lets users create unique digital faces and bodies for use in video games, movies, and TV. It’s designed to be fairly user-friendly so that one doesn’t need a degree in coding in order to use all of its tools.
This is the general mandate of the upcoming Unreal Engine 5 — to make building digital environments (and now people, apparently) easier. Epic CTO Kim Libreri told GamesBeat: “The tool compresses the weeks or months of work it usually takes to create a photorealistic character into minutes or however long you wish to put into customizing the exact character you want.”
The MetaHuman Creator is meant to be used in conjunction with other animation tools and motion capture. Epic also released a video that shows the creator in action, and it looks very much like a character creator in a video game. So much so that I’m more interested in seeing how strange a user can make their digital human rather than how lifelike they can be.
While the digital humans are quite realistic, there’s still a slight uncanny valley-sense of something being just slightly off about them. Maybe it’s the way the lips twitch in a way I rarely see in real people. Maybe it’s the shading on the teeth. I’m not sure. Still, it’s obvious these digital humans aren’t meant to pass for the real thing.
The tools available at the moment are still in early access. There’s currently a sample project with two digital humans available to play with from Epic’s site. You can download it from Epic’s site here.
Source: Epic Games
