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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

Orienting your character in Mixamo

The next step is to orient your character so that it matches the orientation of all the Mixamo characters and their animations. Fortunately, Mixamo gives us the tools to do this rather than leaving us with a laborious trial-and-error process during the export stage.

Take a look at the three arrows at the bottom of the viewport in Figure 5.10. Each of the arrows is for rotating your character and each represents the x, y, and z axis respectively. On the right, you are also given instructions to orient your character; this is what I have done, setting the character to face forward and stand upright.

Now, you may have noticed from the on-screen instructions that Mixamo has asked for the character to be placed in a T-pose position for best results: a T-pose is where the character is in the shape of a T – that is to say, that their arms are straight out to either side, rotated at 90 degrees. In my case, and in the case of all MetaHumans, the...

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