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Epic Games has revealed MetaHuman, a new tool aimed at helping developers create stunningly lifelike characters.
You can see the full introductory video to the MetaHuman tool from Epic Games just below. Just taking a look across the range of incredible creations in the video, it's clear that this is a tool intended for some truly incredibly realistic characters in big-budget releases.
The first half of the relatively brief introductory video gives us a sample of some of the many thousands of characters artists and designers will be able to create using the MetaHuman tool. Then, in the second half of video, we can see the tool in action, as character's cheeks, eyes, noses, and more facial features are all sculpted and changed with relative ease.
Speaking to Digital Foundry, VP of digital humans technology Vladimir Mastilovic claims that no programming knowledge will be required of developers looking to take advantage of the MetaHuman Creators tool, as eager artists can merely pull and drag across the screen to sculpt their creation.
Additionally, Mastilovic also states that MetaHuman Creator uses data from a cloud-based library to extrapolate a real digital person. At the end of the creation process, the designer's creation in MetaHuman can be imported straight into the Unreal Engine via Quixel Bridge, with full animation rigging being provided through Maya. This is all compatible with Unreal Engine 4 and the upcoming Unreal Engine 5.
You might remember that Unreal Engine 5 was used to demo the power of the PS5 last year in 2020, before the console itself had even debuted for the first time. Back in May 2020, an astounding real-time Unreal Engine 5 demo was used for a PS5 tech demo, demonstrating the power of an engine purposefully built for next-gen gaming. It makes sense that Epic is designing MetaHuman Creator with the Unreal Engine 5 in mind.
For a complete look at the next generation of games coming to Sony's new console, head over to our upcoming PS5 games guide for more.
