Epic Games comes with web app for creating realistic digital people – Gaming – News

Epic Games has introduced a new Unreal Engine app. MetaHuman Creator allows users to create realistic people. The tool runs in the cloud and is used via a web app.

De tool is according to Epic Games intended for the creation of digital characters by game developers and creators of real-time 3D content such as movies or television shows. According to the Unreal Engine maker, such digital people can be made in less than an hour; the developer states that previously this could take days or weeks of work. The final characters, called MetaHumans, can then be used in the Unreal Engine.

Epic Games developed the application in collaboration with 3Lateral, a company that was acquired by Epic in 2019 and specializes in the creation of digital characters. Cubic Motion, the company behind the facial animations for games like God of War and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, also contributed to the software. That company has been since last year owned by Epic.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz 3Lateral founder Vladimir Libreri tells that the application works like a species character creator role-playing, but without limitations. He adds that photo-realism is not yet the goal. “We are aiming more for a kind of The Last of Us or Uncharted look, where it is clearly a digital character, but a nice looking digital character.”

The application contains different hairstyles, eighteen different body types and sample clothes as standard. Users can fully customize the characters in the web app, including details such as the teeth. The end result can be exported with different levels of detail for use in the Unreal Engine. Quixel Bridge is used for this. The characters can be animated in the Unreal Engine through various tools or motion capture. Users also get the source data of their characters, in the form of a Mayan file.

Epic Games has released two free sample characters, which can be used in Unreal Engine version 4.26.1 or higher. The web app is not available yet. The full MetaHuman Creator application should become available as an early access version to developers in the coming months. Epic does not mention a specific release period.

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