Epic Games’ hyper-realistic MetaHuman characters are truly impressive, and now the company is making it easier for developers to incorporate them into their projects. At State of Unreal on Tuesday, Epic announced that MetaHuman Creator is now built into the Unreal Engine as part of Unreal Engine 5.6.
The company is also bringing its MetaHumans face and body creation tools, which means that developers will be able to create faces and bodies with fine-tuned parameters for their games or apps. Developers will be able to sell their MetaHumans on Epic’s Fab digital asset marketplace so that they can be used in other games or projects.
On stage, Epic showed how the MetaHuman tools can be used to animate a character in real time, using only a regular webcam to capture the actor’s facial movements. It was pretty cool.
Epic is also offering new licensing options that allow MetaHumans to be used with other game development engines or creative software. This means that creators will be able to use MetaHumans in competing development platforms such as Unity and Godot, as well as in creative programs such as Maya, Houdini, and Blender.
