Hey, here’s one we forgot. The last appearance of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II date of his streak from gameplay from 6 minutes to Game Awards 2021but now it resurfaces today as part of the conference State of Unreal ofEpic Games to the Game Developers Conference 2023.
We were indeed able see how the facial expressions of Senua will be workedthanks to a close-up boosted with hormones fromUnreal Engine 5. The short technical sequence was broadcast for show the possibilities of MetaHuman Animatora future public feature of MetaHuman Creatorthe digital character creation tool touted as easy to use byEpic Games.
Now, with a simple iPhone or a stereo helmet-mounted camera, developers will be able to achieve a motion capture for’record facial movements, which they can then reproduce digitally on their digital avatar. Or how to bring a character to life in a few manipulations and blur even more the boundaries between live action and video games.
MetaHuman Animator will allow you to use your iPhone or Stereo Helmet Mounted Camera (HMC) to reproduce the facial performances of MetaHuman characters in the form of high-fidelity animations. You’ll be able to capture the individuality, realism, and fidelity of your actor’s performance, then transfer every detail and nuance to any MetaHuman to bring it to life in the Unreal Engine.
Photorealistic digital humans need high-quality animation to deliver truly believable performances. The creation process, however, is difficult even for the most experienced creators, as it requires expertise and time. It is extremely difficult for existing performance capture solutions to faithfully recreate every nuance of the actor’s performance for your character. To achieve truly realistic animation, experienced animators often have to meticulously refine the results through a typically laborious and time-consuming process.
But all that will change!
The MetaHuman Animator feature, slated for release over the next few months, will produce the facial animation quality demanded by AAA game developers and Hollywood filmmakers, while being accessible to independent studios and even hobbyist developers. Using your iPhone and a standard tripod, you can create realistic animations for your MetaHumans that will build emotional connections with the audience, even if you don’t consider yourself an animator.
MetaHuman Animator also works with any professional vertical stereo HMC capture solution, including solutions from Technoprops, to deliver even higher quality results. If you also have a body motion capture system, MetaHuman Animator supports timecode. So you can easily align the facial performance animation to the body motion capture and audio for a full character performance. It can even use audio to create realistic tongue animation.
How does MetaHuman Animator work?
This is to ensure that the system understands the actor’s unique facial anatomy and relates to your target character. MetaHuman Animator begins by creating your actor’s MetaHuman identity. This is a mesh that has the same standard topology and skeleton as all MetaHumans.
If you’ve used Mesh to MetaHuman, you know that part of this process is creating a MetaHuman identity from a 3D scan or sculpt. MetaHuman Animator uses this technology to allow MetaHuman identities to be created from a small amount of captured images. The process takes a few minutes and only needs to be done once for each actor.
Once this step is complete, the MetaHuman identity is used to interpret the performance by tracking and solving the positions of the MetaHuman’s facial skeleton. This results in every single expression being recreated precisely on your MetaHuman target character, regardless of the differences between the actor’s and MetaHuman’s traits. In the Unreal Engine, you can view the performance display and compare the animated MetaHuman identity to the actor’s recording, frame by frame.
Another advantage of this feature is that the animation data is clean. Control curves are semantically correct; in other words, they’re where you’d expect them to be on the face skeleton controls (where they would have been if they were created by a human animator), making it easy to adjust them, if needed, to specific artistic purposes.
Since we used a MetaHuman identity from the start, you can be sure that the animation you create today will continue to work if you make future changes to your MetaHuman or want to use it on another MetaHuman. .
MetaHuman Animator’s processing capabilities will be part of the MetaHuman plugin for the Unreal Engine, which can be downloaded for free, just like the engine. If you want to use an iPhone (MetaHuman Animator will work on iPhone 11 and later), you’ll need the free Live Link Face app for iOS, which will be updated with additional capture modes to support this workflow.
That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t tell us when Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II will be released on PC and Xbox Series X|S… While we wait to find out, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is available from €22.85 on Amazon.co.uk.
Read also: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II battles should be better than in the first game
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