Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman Animator a landmark in accessible facial animation

The MetaHuman Creator, a Cloud-streamed app, simplifies the process of creating high-fidelity digital humans from weeks or months to less than an hour. It achieves this by leveraging an extensive library of human appearance and motion variants, allowing for the intuitive creation of new characters that blend actual examples in the library in a data-constrained manner. This tool enables users to start with preset faces and customise them using various facial features, skin complexions, hairstyles, eyes, and clothes to create a broad array of characters​​​​.

Once created, MetaHumans are fully rigged and ready for animation and motion capture in Unreal Engine, complete with levels of detail (LODs) for optimal performance across different platforms. For animation, MetaHuman Animator, a feature of the MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine, allows users to capture facial performances using an iPhone or stereo helmet-mounted camera (HMC) and reproduce them as high-fidelity animations on any MetaHuman character. This process captures the nuances of the actor's performance, transferring every detail onto the MetaHuman to deliver immersive and believable characters. The MetaHuman Animator is designed to be accessible not only to AAA game developers and Hollywood filmmakers but also to indie studios and hobbyists, making high-quality facial animation easier and more cost-effective​​.

MetaHuman Animator and the MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine are notable for their flexibility in performance capture solutions, supporting both iPhone (12 or newer) and professional vertical stereo HMCs. This versatility means that creators can choose the hardware that best suits their project's needs, from cost-effective setups using common smartphones to higher-quality captures with specialised equipment. Furthermore, the system simplifies the animation process by understanding the unique anatomy of the actor's face and relating it to the target character, ensuring clean and correct animation data that's easy to adjust for artistic purposes. This advancement significantly reduces the complexity and cost of creating lifelike facial animations, democratising access to high-quality digital human creation​​.

Unreal Engine 5.3 and the MetaHuman tool are making significant strides in the digital human creation domain, providing tools that streamline the creation and animation process. This progress represents a significant leap forward in overcoming the Uncanny Valley and making the creation of digital humans more accessible to a wider range of creators.