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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

Creating the IK chains

What are IK chains? Put simply, an IK chain is like any other chain, such as a bicycle chain, where each link in the chain has a relationship with the next. This applies to limbs in a body where each bone makes up a link in a chain. So, each limb, such as the shoulder down to the hand, makes up one IK chain.

All an IK Rig does is simplify each rig into the following five IK chains:

  • Spine to head
  • Left shoulder/clavicle to left hand
  • Right shoulder/clavicle to right hand
  • Left thigh to left foot
  • Right thigh to right foot

Note

Ensure that you create each chain in the order that I have written them here and that the order applies to both the source and target skeletons.

To do this, let’s take a closer look at the IK Retargeting tab. In Figure 4.15, knowing that I just need five IK chains, I clicked on the +Add New Chain button five times:

Figure 4.15: IK Retargeting tab for the source

By default...

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