Unreal Engine just revealed its newest tool for creating life-like characters called MetaHuman Creator. To say that this technology looks impressive is surely an understatement. 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, considered by many to be industry leaders in the character rendering, rigging, and mocap technologies, worked together with Unreal to bring MetaHuman to the Unreal Engine ecosystem. MetaHuman is supposed to enable developers and artists to create characters with immense speed. These characters are fully rigged and ready to be animated or used in mocap sessions.
MetaHuman, More Human
What’s most jarring is that from the looks of it, MetaHuman really seems like a very detailed video game character creator. Talking to Eurogamer, VP of Digital Humans Technology at Epic, Vladimir Mastilovic said no programming knowledge would be needed for those using this software. Having that in mind, most artists of various skill levels will probably have a breeze bringing their visions to life. Granted, the tool seems limited to the rendering of human characters only. However, according to a Game Rant article, Epic claims they will expand on MetaHuman in the future. So nothing “out of this world” for now. Even so, MetaHuman could have a significant impact on development cycles in terms of time, budget, and energy, allowing smaller studios such as Ninja Theory to do more with less. Check out the video below to get some sense about how far this thing really goes.
Unreal Engine has already established itself as the default non-in-house game engine alongside Unity. But it’s tools like these that give it an edge over the competition. Many of our favorite games have been developed in the Unreal Engine, such as but not limited to the Arkham Series, Gears Series, and Tekken 7, to name a few.
Unreal Engine 4, the previous version of the game developing software, has been free for use since 2015. This move gave indie developers a shot at tackling game development, and the industry was richer for it.
Hopefully, we hear more about this new mind-bending technology in the future.
