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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

Importing and editing skeletons

In this section, we will add our Mannequin character to our project. Then, to be able to retarget animation from one character to another, the source and target characters both have to have skeletons. We will be looking at both of these skeletons in the following sections.

Adding the Mannequin character

To start, we want to use the skeleton of the Mannequin character that comes shipped with Unreal. To add it to your project, all you need to do is go to Content Browser, click on the +ADD button, and choose Add Feature or Content Pack…:

Figure 3.6: Adding a content pack

Once you’ve clicked on Add Feature or Content Pack…, you’ll see a pop-up window where you can choose Third Person from the Blueprint feature tab:

Figure 3.7: Add Content to the Project

The reason we choose Third Person is that it has a full character, including a mannequin, in the project, which we can repurpose...

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