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Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

By : Brian Rossney, Ciaran Kavanagh
5 (7)
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Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

5 (7)
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)
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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

Installing the Live Link Face app

The Live Link Face app is a free app that you can download onto your iPhone or iPad directly from the App Store. Its sole purpose is to utilize the iPhone’s built-in depth camera, along with facial recognition and pixel tracking technology, to produce data that works within ARKit. In addition to collecting facial motion capture data in real time, it also transmits the data via Internet Protocol (IP) to your desktop computer using a Wi-Fi connection; this data is then picked up by the Live Link utility in Unreal Engine, which we shall delve into later.

Figure 8.1 shows the Live Link Face app in the Apple App Store:

Figure 8.1: The Live Link Face app in the App Store

Once downloaded and installed, open the app to test that it is working. While looking at the display, you should immediately see your face. By default, the mesh overlay is enabled as seen in Figure 8.2, and you’ll see that the mesh very accurately...

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