Book Image

Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

By : Brian Rossney, Ciaran Kavanagh
Book Image

Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

By: Brian Rossney, Ciaran Kavanagh

Overview of this book

MetaHuman Creator (MHC) is an online, user-friendly 3D design tool for creating highly realistic digital humans that can be animated within Unreal Engine (UE) and enhanced with motion capture technology. This means that filmmakers and game developers now have access to a high quality, affordable solution that was previously only available to specialist studios. This book will focus on using UE5 and MHC from a filmmaker angle. Firstly, you’ll understand how to use the online MHC to create a digital character, changing its facial structure, body type, and clothing. After that, you’ll learn all the necessary steps to bring the character into UE5 and set it up for animation. Then, using an iPhone and a webcam to capture face and body movements, you’ll mix these motion capture files, refine the animations using the MetaHuman Control Rig, and save these takes to be reused and edited again within the Level Sequencer. On top of that, you’ll learn how to create a rendered video file for film production using both the Level Sequencer and a VR Cinematic Camera. By the end of this book, you’ll have created your own MetaHuman character, as well as face and body motion capture data, and learned the necessary skills to give your future projects further realism and creative control.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Creating a Character
4
Part 2: Exploring Blueprints, Body Motion Capture, and Retargeting
9
Part 3: Exploring the Level Sequencer, Facial Motion Capture, and Rendering

Downloading and exporting your character

It’s time to download your character and export it from MHC and into Unreal Engine. To do this, you need to open up Bridge and navigate to your character. You may remember this from the moment before you first launched the MHC. However, if you have done some editing, you will notice that the picture of your character in Bridge has also been updated since the last autosave. If you look at Figure 2.47, you’ll notice that my Glenda character has been updated in Bridge:

Figure 2.47: Download and Export settings

This is where you can change the Resolution, Download Settings, and Export Settings options, which we will take a look at here.

Resolution

At the bottom left of Figure 2.47, you will see a dropdown menu that relates to the resolution of the texture maps for our characters.

The highest available is 8K resolution. This means that the highest texture map is over 8,000 pixels wide. That’s...