Increasingly Finer Games One of the most difficult tasks in the world is creating people, especially realistic faces.February 10th, US time, game giantEpic GamesIs Unreal EngineShow off new character creation toolsdid. This MetaHuman Creator can create an infinite variety of photo-realistic digital portrait images with far less effort than ever before.
MetaHuman is a character design tool that combines prepared presets for rough modeling and then minor corrections. This resolution, the computing power required to render characters with lighting, and the amount of storage will be enormous, making it a cloud-hosted service.
As you’ll soon notice with the high-definition character creator, you’ll find presets for hairstyles, ears, beards, lips, and other additions, replacements, and tweaks like the digital version of Mr. Potato Head. You can do it. No one would have expected to be able to do this.
Face close-up generated by Metahuman. CG showing the details of skin reflectance and wrinkles (image credit: Epic)
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With MetahumanCyberpunk 2077(Cyberpunk 2077) ”is different from the creator tools used in consumer games in terms of definition and flexibility. As you can see from the video, the quality of hair, skin, eyes, teeth, etc. is overwhelmingly high. When an elderly Asian man moves his face, the wrinkles on his face are deformed and shadows are formed. The effect of light on the skin is also completely different between the woman in the center and the man on the left.
The woman in the center starts out as a middle-aged man. Instead of applying a preset that transforms into a “female” at once, fine-tune the details such as the nose and eyes one by one. It is shown that the face does not “break” even if these operations are performed. It is a risk that many creators have troubled to “break” the face due to misalignment. You can see an overview of the process in the video below.
Metahuman also has the usual creator tools built in, allowing you to create animations and adjust meshes in a variety of ways. You can also export 3D models for use with other tools.
This level of definition itself is not unprecedented. However, rendering extreme close-ups and subtle details requires a huge amount of work. The Epic Games approach not only raises the bar for people, lighting, etc., but also makes it much more efficient to implement in the game. If only a major game maker with abundant resources can create high-definition characters, the merit of the game business as a whole is small.
Epic Games recentlyAcquired RAD Game ToolsHowever, as soon as they acquired companies with experts in this area, such as 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, they added their names to their credits. Unreal Engine is often referred to as a monolithic platform in computer graphics, but it’s actually assembled from many details.
Related article:Epic Games Acquires Long-established Game Development Tools Company RAD Game Tools
It’s a very clever blend of countless improvements and advances made by dozens of companies that are now acquired and become Epic’s business units. This is similar to the current major operating system, which is a combination of many apps.
MetaHuman Creator isn’t ready for everyone yet. But Epic Games has an early access program so interested users can sign up. If you’re currently using Unreal Engine, two characters are available for testing that you can work with in this environment.
Category:Games / eSports
tag:Epic Games、Unreal Engine
Image credit: Epic
(Text: Devin Coldewey, Translated:Umihiko Namekawa @Facebook）
