Epics gratis MetaHuman Creator-software er ret fantastisk. En virtuel kvinde smiler.

Epic Games lanceret MetaHumanCreator this week. It’s a videogame character creation tool, essentially, but it’s free, it isn’t followed by a 140-hour RPG, it runs in your browser (actually in the omnipresent “cloud”), and it can export ready-to-use character models for Unreal Engine projects. To try it, you have to tilmeld dig her, og det kan tage lidt tid at få din invitation.

I’m probably never going to use one of my “MetaHumans” for an Unreal Engine project (which is all you’re allowed to use them for), because that seems hard, but MetaHuman Creator itself is easy to use. And fun. Who doesn’t love a good character creator? You can sculpt features by clicking and dragging parts of the face, as well as blend the features of included faces together, which is so effortless that it seems obvious—I’m sure the trigonometry under the hood is no big deal, right?

Der er også granulære muligheder for øjne (hvordan har du det med sclera-vaskularitet?) og tænder (plakskyder bekræftet), hud- og makeup-muligheder, en håndfuld frisurer at vælge imellem og et par muligheder for ansigtshår.

MetaHuman Creator isn’t a fully-featured 3D modeling tool, and doesn’t interpret your inputs literally, say, by moving the tip of the nose wherever you drag it. It morphs features according to your input while keeping the face within certain face-like parameters; there are constraints, and you can’t use it to make any kind of person. It includes 60 face presets, though, which is more than enough to blend and sculpt unique characters. After tinkering for under an hour I’d created someone who doesn’t really look like anyone else, but who does look like a real person. It’s pretty wild. 

And there’s something even wilder to discover. MetaHumans Creator was built by a pair of Epic-owned studios, 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, the latter of which does facial animation. The software includes three built-in animation sequences. Hit one, and your made-up human starts realistically yawning and puffing up their cheeks. The animations are nuanced enough that you can tell that the character is only foregive to smile at one point—smiling for a camera. But this character, or at least their facial structure, didn’t exist an hour ago. 

Sometimes I have to shake myself out of a sort of technology numbness. 10 years ago, I did not imagine that I’d have free access to something like this. I was playing Skyrim and thought it looked really good.

De begrænsede frisuremuligheder og minimal hårtilpasning vil give væk, at en karakter blev lavet med MetaHuman Creator, og jeg formoder, at du efter et stykke tid måske vil bemærke tilbagevendende næse- og øreformer og hudteksturer og så videre. Men 3D-kunstnere kan eksportere deres MetaHuman-figurer og redigere dem i Autodesk Maya eller andre applikationer, hvilket gør dem så unikke, som de vil, og derefter animere dem i hånden eller med deres egen performance capture ved hjælp af noget som f.eks. FaceWare.

Den ene regel er, at du kun kan udgive karakterer, du laver med MetaHuman Creator i Unreal Engine projects, binding them to Epic’s Unreal license. That license is quite permissive for small projects: You can use the Unreal development kit free, and if you publish a game made with it, you don’t pay Epic any royalties until you’ve made at least $1 million in revenue. After that, the royalty is five percent.

For at bruge denne tidlige adgangsudgivelse af MetaHuman Creator skal du tilmelde dig en registrering side. Der er ingen krav for at registrere mig, men det tog mig en dag at få e-mailen om, at jeg kunne hoppe ind. 

I hadn’t used this kind of cloud-based software before, and I am reluctantly impressed. I’ve been using it via Chrome, and it reacts very near instantly to my input. Sessions are limited to one hour right now, but you can start a new session right after you get booted, and it automatically saves your work. I had to briefly queue to get back in once, but not for more than a minute.

MetaHuman Creator might be considered one aspect of Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s long term vision for a gaming “metaverse,” a vision that just helped Epic pull in another 1 milliard dollar i finansiering. That vision encompasses lots of different ideas, including stuff like crossplay, but part of the plan is to produce technology that allows more people to make more stuff—growing the “creator economy,” in tech industry speak. (We used to call it “indie game development.”) Valve and Unity have been big players in making powerful development tools more accessible, too. 

I’m sure I can hardly imagine what small development teams will be able to produce in the future using the powerful technology of big companies like this. At the same time, it feels inevitable that a low-fi, hand-coded and modeled game development scene will continue to exist, and perhaps grow as a countermovement.

Kilde: https://www.pcgamer.com/metahuman-creator-early-access-epic