Epic Games have just released a sneak peak of their in development MetaHuman Creator, a tool for creating life-like digital character models in hours. This application seems to be the cumulation of recent Epic Games acquisitions including character animation companies Cubic Motion and 3Lateral. MetaHuman Creator is a cloud powered tool that is built upon a database of 3D assets Unreal Engine have assembled.
Details from the Unreal Engine blog:
MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed app designed to take real-time digital human creation from weeks or months to less than an hour, without compromising on quality. It works by drawing from an ever-growing library of variants of human appearance and motion, and enabling you to create convincing new characters through intuitive workflows that let you sculpt and craft the result you want. As you make adjustments, MetaHuman Creator blends between actual examples in the library in a plausible, data-constrained way. You can choose a starting point by selecting a number of preset faces to contribute to your human from the diverse range in the database.
You can select from around 30 hair styles that use Unreal Engine’s strand-based hair, or hair cards for lower-end platforms. There’s also a set of example clothing to choose from, as well as 18 differently proportioned body types. When you’re happy with your human, you can download the asset via Quixel Bridge, fully rigged and ready for animation and motion capture in Unreal Engine, and complete with LODs. You’ll also get the source data in the form of a Maya file, including meshes, skeleton, facial rig, animation controls, and materials.
MetaHuman Creator is about to enter early access and you can apply for entry here. They also released a project on the Unreal Engine Marketplace that includes 2 example generated MetaHuman models as a preview of the type of characters MetaHuman Creator will be able to create. You can learn more in the video below.