نرم افزار رایگان MetaHuman Creator Epic بسیار شگفت انگیز است. یک زن مجازی لبخند می زند.

اپیک گیمز راه اندازی شد خالق MetaHuman 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 اینجا ثبت نام کنیدو دریافت دعوتنامه ممکن است کمی طول بکشد.

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?

همچنین گزینه های دانه ای برای چشم ها (در مورد عروق صلبیه چه احساسی دارید؟) و دندان ها (لغزنده پلاک تایید شد)، گزینه های پوست و آرایش، تعداد انگشت شماری مدل مو برای انتخاب، و چند گزینه موی صورت وجود دارد.

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 وانمود کردن 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.

گزینه‌های محدود مدل مو و حداقل سفارشی‌سازی مو باعث می‌شود که شخصیتی با MetaHuman Creator ساخته شده است، و من فکر می‌کنم بعد از مدتی ممکن است متوجه تکرار شکل‌های بینی و گوش و بافت پوست و غیره شوید. اما هنرمندان سه بعدی می توانند شخصیت های MetaHuman خود را صادر کنند و آنها را در Autodesk Maya یا برنامه های دیگر ویرایش کنند، آنها را تا آنجا که می خواهند منحصر به فرد کنند، و سپس آنها را با دست یا با ضبط عملکرد خود، با استفاده از چیزی شبیه به آن، متحرک کنند. Faceware.

یک قانون این است که شما فقط می توانید شخصیت هایی را که با MetaHuman Creator ساخته اید در آنها منتشر کنید موتور غیر واقعی 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.

برای استفاده از این نسخه دسترسی زودهنگام MetaHuman Creator، باید در یک ثبت نام کنید صفحه ثبت نام. هیچ الزامی برای ثبت نام وجود ندارد، اما یک روز طول کشید تا ایمیلی دریافت کنم که می گوید می توانم وارد شوم. 

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 میلیارد دلار بودجه. 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.

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