Famous for their wildly popular franchise Fortnite, Epic Games’ new ‘Digital Person’ creator is completely free for use.
Released to early access after the 14th of April, ‘MetaHuman Creator’ was made by the company for generating easy and highly detailed images of people. First created for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, the software will simplify the character creation process while still guaranteeing a high level of quality.
Furthermore, the app will also enable quick exports into other computer graphics systems for further editing. The ‘rigging’, the bones of a CGI character, will also be automatically made by MetaHuman Creator. As a key feature, the app has an entire database of 3-d scanned people. This allows the engine to generate an entirely new person at a moment’s notice.
The company’s chief technology officer Kim Libreri says,
“Creation time for a high-quality digital character can now be measured in minutes and hours rather than weeks or months.”
MetaHuman Creator is browser-based but requires registration to Epic Games to use.
A Shortcut to Humanity
Today, realistic graphics can cost developers and employees millions in overtime, funding and labour. Epic Games new software is a bold and interesting new way to make a major part of digital creation easy for any artist. The creators that benefit the most from these advances in new technology are smaller, indie creators.
Guillaume Broche, former Ubisoft Employee and founder of Paris based studio Sandfall Interactive, has spoken glowingly of MetaHuman Creator. The software has already outdone anything his team could do in Blender. It enabled Sandfall to create high detailed background characters, freeing up the 16 strong staffs workload.
“For small teams, to get a level of quality from MetaHuman that’s above what most character artists can produce is a pretty fantastic opportunity.”
Currently, MetaHuman Creator has already seen usage in filmmaking. Recently, Epic games combined with Universal Studios and Mandalorian director Rick Famuyiwa to create ‘We Will Be Monsters’. The four-episode miniseries uses MetaHuman Creator to re-create Universal Studios famous monster for an event with Epics’ own Fortnite. Epic used MetaHuman Creator intensively to create the Bride of Frankenstein. The software generated 6 variants of her facial scars and defects before combining the details into one character.
As software like MetaHuman Creator keeps developing to its peak, developers and gamer can hope to see a healthier industry. At last, creators can have more time to fine-tune and perfect their craft, without worries of technological limits forcing a last-minute crunch and crunch dependent working environments.
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