Can I turn myself into a MetaHuman? | The Future of Game Characters!

so a couple of weeks ago i made a video on metahumans it's a new system for building digital humans by unreal engine for things like video games or virtual production and since making that video i've been really keen to see what else messy humans can do and fortunately for me a couple of days ago epic games opened up their new meta humans creation system to alpha testers and the second i could i registered to have a go now for years i've been wanting to do one thing above all others and that's create a digital version of myself to put into virtual environments so i thought the first thing that i tried to do in this meta-human system was to try and make a virtual version of myself as a way to stress test the software and learn a bit more about it so let's get it fired up and crack on so here we are inside the metahuman system so it looks like it is a cloud-based program something that epic games has been talking about for quite a while and what that currently means is that this entire creation system is being run on a server somewhere else inside one of every game's server farms and the entire thing is being streamed to my computer literally like a live stream which is great as long as the bandwidth is good the first thing i noticed was only for the first few minutes but the resolution was absolutely awful and it was very very laggy so what i was finding was that i couldn't actually really press any buttons i couldn't get any quick feedback and the entire creation process as you can see here even when it's sped up by 400 times was really difficult to work in to be honest it was it was you could see all these amazing tools and you couldn't really do anything with them so it was incredibly stressful in that regard but as you'll probably see in the second it took about 10 minutes or so but eventually all of a sudden it just went to high resolution streaming and incredibly responsive now it's really important to understand that the point of an alpha test is effectively to stress test your tools and your ideas and your infrastructure so epic games are going to be watching all of these alpha testers go and they're going to be looking at the amount of people they can serve at one time to try solve these kinds of problems by the time the tool goes live obviously another factor is right now this is one of the most interesting things to come out of epic games in a good few weeks and i would imagine that tens of thousands of people like me were trying to have a go all at the same time so they really were pushing the systems to the limits but there you go you can now see that all of a sudden the bandwidth has caught up and the tools are a lot more responsive and now i could finally start getting into exploring it so like a lot of modern character creation systems including in a lot of big video games this meta human system uses a facial blend system where you have a number of real-life scans that basically act as face shape data that you can then either blend together or modify to go off and create your own thing which is a really great way of bringing real life realism into it without having to necessarily make sure that the end user has a kind of master level understanding of how to create faces which frankly i don't i think that's where a system like this is quite powerful for either one-off artists or quick artists or as the baseline for some infrastructure to put inside the video game as you can see here this is just me getting to grips with a lot of the different blend tools and to try get something that approximates my face now i'm quite european in a lot of my features and i'm incredibly pale because apparently my ancestors never went outside now i've made plenty of attempts to make myself in online video games or rpgs before and i've never really got that close in fact most of the time when i've tried it's been an absolutely horrifying result and what i was finding here was that it was actually quite straightforward and intuitive this is definitely in terms of me as a layperson for making humans this is a really nice intuitive way of creating people definitely compared to the kind of things that i've seen before so in that regard it's absolutely fantastic and i've sped the footage up now just so we can kind of see me go through the process of exploring some of the different assets and basically just trying to kind of find a look that approximates me i think at this stage i'm not particularly close yet there are things that are kind of close like the the hair is close enough you know it's not exactly me it's not exactly the right color but it's pretty close and right now the face i think i've got the mouth right but the rest is absolutely nowhere near so it really is just a kind of a process of messing around with different shapes looking at photos of yourself or reference if it's not you and trying to get something that's a little closer and i'm telling you now no matter how pale i make this character he's not quite as pale as he needs to be in retrospect and i think that's probably just a self-image thing if i'm honest i definitely seem to be going towards the ready player one avatar rules where your digital avatar is an idealized you know very nice version of yourself but from certain angles it does kind of look like me and that was genuinely it was more surprising than anything else because i wasn't sure how close i was going to get so now let's jump into an unreal engine level that i made a little while ago now i want this to look fairly cinematic so we've got all of the settings cranked and we've got ray tracing enabled and i think this will be a really good kind of base just to see how these metahuman models interact with digital worlds effectively what i'm looking for is for this model to sit in here seamlessly and to almost more than most kind of 3d models feel like it belongs in the space and then after a few seconds of loading there we are i would say that looks pretty good pretty excellent especially compared to the kind of models that i've personally worked with in the past this is a lot closer to the absolute kind of high-end professional grade which is really amazing to see now let's zip around and see if we can find any interesting lighting conditions to play around with now because i work mostly with virtual reality that means the kind of technology that i use inside my 3d worlds has to be incredibly optimized so i have not i haven't really had too much of a chance to work with things like grooming or a lot of the kind of really complicated skin shaders so this is just a lot of fun and the thing that i found literally everywhere across the entire scene was how blown away by the way this uh character just kind of picked up the local lighting it was really really good to see and yeah it absolutely looks like it's interacting with the light the bounce light and the environment all of the reflections it's it's a lot of fun to watch [Music] and what i have very much found in the few hours that i've spent playing around with metahumans is that when the lighting is interesting and the framing and the composition is interesting you really get the most bang for your buck and this kind of moody dark room with uh sunlight casting through these slim windows was exactly the kind of thing that i was looking for and actually here's where things got weird now so far it hasn't really looked like me very much it's it's been a kind of weird cousin almost however when i put it in this lighting position and i started messing around with a little bit of key lighting and bounce lighting all of a sudden it started looking eerily weirdly similar this this could be a weird sketch or photograph of my face now it's not quite there but when i showed this to some friends and family the majority of the response was how did you do that just from this angle particularly no other angle but this angle and i think i know why now when it's lit properly you can clearly examine the facial features and once again the human brain is incredibly good at reading minuscule high levels of detail from the human face more than we ever consciously realize we're doing so you can tell even if a nose is a slightly different shape or the eyes are slightly different you can tell that it's not the same person or it's a different person which is why after some time of getting to know someone people can typically distinguish between for example identical twins however when you subtract some of that lighting when you make it more difficult to really read into the facial features so exactly what i'm doing here with this kind of moody slightly high contrast lighting then you fill in the gaps with your mind for other things that you know the jawline here is a really great example because i can't read into the details of the jawline because the shadow is quite gentle i'm filling in the gaps with what i know about my own jawline and so as a result in my brain my brain is ticking another checkbox that says yeah this is me and not someone else uh same with all of the kind of sharp features of the face that are being highlighted by the sun they're not quite right but there's you can see a lot more kind of uh almost relief in the face when it's lit this way and once again that's something that i've got so the brain's kind of going oh yeah that looks that looks quite similar and i think the final thing is when i used that very bright white light it made the skin look really pale there you go and unfortunately oh yeah that sells it that looks like me that's the face i see in the mirror every day and that's honestly strange i think i've simultaneously crossed the uncanny valley a tiny bit and i've also fallen into it so hard that i don't quite know what's going on and it kind of blew my mind now i had a couple friends genuinely ask how i did that and asked what i've been up to for the last few days this only took an hour or so but one of my much more visually focused friends and architect did say yeah mate you wish this is definitely not you so i think it really does depend on the kind of things that you're looking at and the way that you examine the image as to exactly how you'll kind of understand it but as to whether i successfully managed to create myself in 3d i would say mostly yes again when it's lit properly and when you get it from the certain angles it does look a fair amount like me but overall when you look at it head-on it's it's clearly a different similar looking but different person once again i think the best analogy i can give is ready player one your digital avatar reminds people of you but then they go oh you you've been uh working out haven't you and after the last fairly cooped up year i'll take that now the final thing that i want to do is reflect on the metahumans tool a tiny bit i found it honestly well very good the first thing to know is that it really does produce incredibly high quality models to the point where even with a fairly beefy system it will really drop the frame rate when you're running them in ultra high detail and i think that's because the highest levels of detail are absolutely designed for things like virtual production which is understandable as well as that this is a forward-looking technology that's probably going to be used with unreal engine 5 projects it's probably going to be something that is going to be iterated on over the next few years so that level of building a next-gen bar setting tool is understandable but i think another thing to understand about this tool is at the moment and i think probably for the majority of its existence it kind of sits in between what i describe as a video game character creator and a high-end professional workflow character creation tool and there are other very high-end character creation solutions out there a really great example would be the re-illusion character creator and all of the accompanying tools to basically produce industry standard animations for films games and also characters and from what i've looked into it it really is very powerful it's quite polished and it's also out of beta as far as i understand so it's it's something that's being used quite a lot and has a really good track record and i think that's just one of the main things to understand is that metahumans is amazing and it's probably the most complete or at the very least the most powerful start to finish character creation tool for just something out of the box for being quick but if you need more customization there are other solutions out there as well things like character creator which is something that small studios can probably wrap their head around but you can also get a lot of real customization out of as far as i understand and then if you need to build things to your own specification even more i think you'd probably just do it from scratch or you do use in-house tools or like most studios you'd mix and match depending on the different project needs but yeah for an alpha i would say that the meta-human system is very impressive it's definitely still in the alpha stage there's you know only a number of assets there's only a number of base scans and i think for now that's a good thing because this isn't a stage where you need to produce a huge amount of content this is the stage where you need to figure out what works what doesn't what needs fixing and what needs changing so for now i think basically just having a niche number of assets that can be absolutely battle tested and picked apart by different users is a really great way to go and i very much look forward to seeing how the tool develops i look forward to seeing it get used in games and film projects and i look forward to seeing what meta humans might do for the future video games in general a great example of unreal engine 5. i don't think epic games have said it out loud yet but i would really guess that unreal engine 5 is going to lean heavily on this digital human software just from a few things that you know almost have you know been set between the lines on things like forum posts or in interviews with epic games and i look forward heavily to seeing that but now as always i need to get back and build some more virtual reality video games so i'd just like to thank you so much for watching the video if you manage to find it i'm so grateful because obviously youtube is a massive platform and i am a tiny channel so i absolutely love it when i see people interacting with my content or enjoying what i've made it really does mean a lot so i'll see you soon when i make another video until then take [Music] you

Channel: Alistair Hume

Views: 38,701

Keywords: Epic Games, Unreal Engine, metahuman creator, metahuman, game trailer, video games, character creator, metahuman character creator, epic games metahuman, metahuman creator trailer, epic metahuman, metahuman chracter creator, epic creator, epic games creator, epic game character creator, epic games character creator, Character, Creator, Digital Human, Epic, Game Development, Game Engine, GameDev, Human, MetaHuman, Model, UE4, UE5, Virtual Reality, VR, Valve Index, Ready Player One

Id: pc-reOFLSX0

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021