One step closer to having your own, real-time, hyper-realistic face ready for you in the MetaVerse in mere minutes!
Man, what an impressive presentation this week by Epic, owner of the Unreal 5 engine. Epic flexed their muscles by showing us a real-time smartphone face-scan of Melina Juergens, the real-life actress from the (rather great!) videogame Hellblade (2). They transferred the scan in the Unreal engine MetaHuman generator and within minutes, there’s this true-to-life animated facial scan of Melina that can be used independently of the scan that they made. To save you some time, below is the end-result (no sound). Read on for more info and the longer video, where you can see the process yourself!
The process is a bit difficult to describe, but have a look below! Four screens, from the original actress to a fully independent, facial animated 3D avatar. After mere minutes, flexing just three emotions (happy, angry, neutral), there’s a jaw-dropping rendition of her face with fully animated face muscles that you can “paste” in the Metaverse / a videogame with facial animations that are almost life-like.
The process looks so simple. Create a scan within minutes where the actor shows some different faces / emotions. The specific animations of this person are made into a standardized facial construct, where you can use the actor’s specific emotional features and facial movements on any avatar you create in the future. So yes, you can create your own life-like avatar and implement your own facial animations on the head of an orc.. or Donald Trump… or… whatever beast / person you want. Hello possibilties… hello ethics! The video below doesn’t show Melina’s facial animations on an orc (what a shame! 🙂 ), but on totally different human 3d avatars.
Just imagine what this means for low budget videogame studios. Full mo-cap esque animations in mere minutes of work. Even if you look at the end resut in the video there’s still something… “off” I guess. There’s still a slight gap between animated and true-to-life (luckiliy!) But man, have we come a long way in real-time character rendering. Onwards to shooting your own created avatars in Fortnite! 🙂
This isn’t avaiable for the gen-pop right now, but what is… is the MetaHuman creator to design your own 3d avatar based on a character building tool, still without the scan possibilities. Register with Epic and you can create your own real-time digital avatar, in the available cloud-based version of MetaHuman. You can even set the tooth-spacing, what a time to be alive! For real: just tinker a bit in this tool, it will give you an all new vision on the usage of avatars.
The full on-stage demo: