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  • Book Overview & Buying Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator
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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

Technical requirements

Before we get started, I must remind you that this book is about extremely high-quality 3D characters so it’s important you understand this before setting up Unreal and risk being disappointed because of technical issues. This is because Unreal Engine, like any 3D graphics tool, requires a powerful machine; much of this power comes from the graphics cards.

As a result, if you want to enjoy the real-time experience of working in Unreal, you’ll need a computer that can handle the best settings and display a MetaHuman character in real time. Otherwise, you’ll experience a very sluggish machine with a tendency to crash a lot, and nobody wants this. To complete this chapter, you will need an internet connection and the minimum hardware specifications that Epic Games recommends:

  • Windows 10 64-bit
  • 64 GB RAM
  • 256 GB SSD (OS drive)
  • 2 TB SSD (data drive)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
  • 10-Core Xeon E5-2643 @ 3.4 GHz

The screen grabs you will see in the pages of this book are from my own machine, which is configured as follows:

  • Windows 10 64-bit
  • 256 GB RAM
  • 1 TB GB SSD (OS drive)
  • 4 TB SSD (data drive)
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
  • 20-Core i9 10-900k @ 3.7 GHz

If you’re a devoted Mac user, you’re just not going to have as good an experience as you would have compared to a Windows user. Much of this is to do with Epic Games putting more time into developing the engine for use on Windows. This isn’t to say it’s not available on Mac but many of the features, particularly rendering features to achieve photorealism, are not available on Mac machines, most notably Direct X 12 and Ray Tracing Cores on the NVIDIA RTX series of GPU cards.

I’d also like to point out that there are solutions out there that will allow you to test on powerful machines. For the most part, they will get you through all the chapters of this book, except for live facial motion capture and any live body motion capture that may be featured. Therefore, if you’re on a budget, I suggest you look at some cloud computing solutions such as the following: paperspace.com.

Note

On a cloud machine, you still won’t be able to do any live motion capture, as this requires a direct interface or shared network with your machine. However, you could take advantage of the higher specification of the cloud machine for experimenting with render and lighting settings.

At this point, you may be getting needlessly worried. However, I personally tried using the tools mentioned in this book on a lower-spec machine and for the most part, I was able to work through it using very low render settings. However, I was just not able to do any live motion capture at all. Instead, I was only able to rely on library motion capture – so if you plan to learn now and invest in a newer, faster machine later, this book is certainly still for you.

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