The MetaHuman Animator tool allows you to quickly and accurately animate hyper-realistic metahumans using your iPhone
Epic has released a tool designed to capture an actor’s face with an iPhone and then apply the image to a hyper-realistic “Metal Man” in Unreal Engine in “minutes.” It was announced this spring. MetaHuman Animator is already available for developers. The company also released a video to show what the tool is capable of.
The Epic video demonstrates amazing facial animation. However, the company itself cites the speed with which MetaHuman Animator produces results as its main advantage.
“The animation is created locally using the GPU, and the final animation is available in a few minutes,” the company said in a press release.
This not only saves the studio money by capturing what’s happening more efficiently, but also encourages experimentation and greater creativity. For example, you can make several takes and then evaluate and select the best one. At the same time, you can “see the results in about the time it takes to make a cup of coffee.” Facial animation can be applied to a MetaHuman character in just a few clicks, and the system is even capable of animating the character’s tongue based on the actor’s speech.
Capturing an actor’s actions using an iPhone has been possible in Unreal Engine since 2020 with the launch of the Epic Live Link Face app for iOS, but now it’s combined with the high level of detail available through Epic MetaHuman technology. MetaHuman Animator can be used with the iPhone 12 (and later), as well as with “existing vertical stereo head cameras to achieve even greater accuracy.”
The Blue Dot video gives you an idea of what the new animation tool is capable of. Although Epic claims that it is possible to customize the animation after capture, in this case “minimal intervention” was made on top of the actor’s performance capture.
In addition, Epic has prepared a video on how to use this tool and documentation in the Epic Developer Community.
Ninja Theory has shown the process of creating (and the result of) facial animation for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II using a new tool in Unreal Engine.
