Epic is making it easier to create MetaHumans

Epic Games’ hyperrealistic MetaHuman characters are seriously impressive, and now the company is making it easier for developers to incorporate them into their projects. At its State of Unreal show on Tuesday, Epic announced that the MetaHuman Creator is now embedded within Unreal Engine as part of Unreal Engine 5.6.

The company is also bringing its face-authoring tools for MetaHumans’ faces to bodies, meaning developers will be able to create faces and bodies with fine-tuned parameters for their games or applications. Developers will be able to sell their MetaHumans on Epic’s Fab marketplace for digital assets, too, so they can be used in other games or projects.

Onstage, Epic showed how the MetaHuman tools could be used to animate a character in real time — and using just a consumer webcam to capture the actor’s facial movements. It was pretty cool.

Epic also has new licensing options that allow MetaHumans to be used with other game development engines or creative software. That means that creators will be able to use MetaHumans in rival development platforms like Unity and Godot and in creative software such as Maya, Houdini, and Blender.