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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

Baking and editing facial animation in Unreal

Building on the previous chapter, where we added facial motion capture using the iPhone, we will apply the process of baking animation keyframes to the Faceware Studio Capture.

Similar to how we baked motion capture data onto a body control rig, we are going to do the same with the face rig and then create an additive section to make animation adjustments:

  1. With Face selected, right-click and choose Bake to Control Rig, followed by Face_ControlBoard_CtrlRig, as per Figure 9.29:

Figure 9.29: Baking the facial capture Animation Asset to the control rig

Once we’ve baked to the control rig, we should see the track looks similar to Figure 9.30:

Figure 9.30: The mocap data baked into the control rig

  1. For safety, we want to lock the baked track so that we don’t inadvertently edit it. Do this by right-clicking on the track and choosing Locked, as per Figure 9.31:
  2. ...

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