METAHUMAN Creator is AWESOME!!! ... and Limited

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here game from scratch and today we are going hands-on with metahuman creator yesterday epic games released this in early access i told you as soon as i have access to it i will take you hands-on and hey that's what we're going to do today and spoiler alert it is pretty awesome now of course it has also got some limitation this is an early access and you should set your expectations accordingly but it is impressive for sure especially when it comes to creating faces so what we see in front of us this here is meta human creator now one of the first things you probably need to know about this is this here is a browser application it's basically streaming everything here you can see it it is running in my case i'm using opera gx they say they require chrome but almost every browser out there is chromium based right now so you should be fine regardless another thing you should notice right here is it's giving me this warning at the bottom that it is only displaying lods zero and one for certain things using grooms for uh hair effects and facial hair effects and so on certain ones and we'll notice them when we get to them can only show highest levels of detail so if you want to do a more detailed model you're going to have to stick to certain options but sorry not a more detail technically less detail if you want multiple lods that is the issue another problem that we've got at the end here is getting your results out here is quicksole bridge i am trying to export out this fellow that i created earlier on and i've been generating for a while now so i'm not going to show you the end results in unreal engine today because i think their servers might be struggling a little bit to get like the workloads done because everything here runs on their end but what we're going to do now is create a character uh somewhat like uh this fine fellow i created earlier on in order to do so what we do is head on over here to the my metahumans we're going back to the very beginning here all of this stuff can take a little bit of time uh in this case we're good to go so you can see here i've created uh these two fellows right there i'm gonna create a new one for you guys right now just go here to create metahumans and the way this works is you start from a template now i told you earlier on uh that anything that has this warning right now are limited a lot of times it's the hair or the beards or whatever that are causing problems anything with that uh marker you're gonna run into problems if you want to have multiple lods i'm gonna ignore that for today because i don't really care but uh that's one of those things they are working on so if you want to have it so that you can use this in like an android game with low resolution or whatever like a low polygon lod version you're going to want to stay away from those ones for now now again you can see here currently in development so that's something that is going to improve over time all right so now what we got to do is pick our base character from this particular case let's go with brian here um but it's just like basically a starting point one of the things i found so far with metahuman creator is it's really hard to create monsters so when you're in something like the fallout 4 character creator you could create some interesting choices in this particular case with metahuman creator you know what it limits you to like the real world limitations so when you're doing skin colors you can't create a purple character when you're morphing or changing the size of things you can't create you know monstrosities out of it everything is kind of limited to human ideals i have found one bug by the way if you're at epic games there's no ability to remove makeup uh it's one of those things that you should probably be aware of all right so here you can see uh middle mouse button i can orbit it around by default we are uh we're animating like so we are now in preview mode and what you can do now is either move sculpt or blend so i'm going to just basically stop the animations right now we can also switch using one two three four five and six between different areas so head body torso legs feet and far now what you're going to find is that the majority of the functionality that's available right now in my in meta human creator is around the face you've got very little control over the body and the options for uh clothing are anemic we're talking like three or four items per body part so this is mostly about the head but truth of the matter is where you kind of make or break a human these days is in the head so i can understand why they focus there and i think over time we're going to see obviously more additions there this is an early access preview okay so here we are with the character the first way we can start doing things well here i'll show you the two simplest ways we do moves and here you're just using control area surfaces and you can move things around and you can literally sculpt characters that way very simple stuff but it also is conforming to like the laws of nature so as you like you know move the nose up it's displacing the skin behind it and it's really again hard to create monstrously bad characters i've tried it i you really can't even if you want to make the ears like super bad that's about as bad as you can make an ear so that that's about it for the extent of from blending and so on um i don't know why that didn't take all right why are you not moving here i may have broke the ears all right anyways uh so you can move things you can also sculpt things which you've got a a number of control points and you basically kind of go in and move individual so if you want to pull his cheekbones out a bit or in you can control individual points on the character and again all the results that you're going to get from this are reasonably realistic it does look like i broke the ears though that's interesting so it does look like you you can break the rigging behind this to a certain degree but one another thing that you can do here that's really cool is we can go back to that original thing and remember how we could uh choose a character to work from well we can grab a couple other ones so let's grab him we'll grab her so we want to add some femininity to this guy's features and him all right so we've got now three characters in here and we are in blend mode now you see we have a number of different control points here so let's say we wanted to have the chin go well now what we do is go towards the direction of the person we want to be more similar to and you do a blend shape of that person that's pretty neat we can actually keep adding more so now when i do it i'm going to have four control points that i can travel towards and we can blend between those things if i want to change the eyes we can blend the eyes between the four different options we've got and this allows you to kind of especially um i don't know if i can build it in my own character i can't that's unfortunate too right now does it look like uh my own custom creations are available as part of blend targets hopefully that gets added in the future because then you can just start kind of deriving from your own person but anyways that is the three different modes to work with this guy you've got blend where you're moving between up to you you just keep adding adding options in here and then you'll get more and more blend point choices between so each each circle on that blend target represents the blendiness towards that person if i want to move uh halfway towards this person and this person i go here and if i want to move more towards him i go up more towards her i go down so using that combination things you could do some pretty oppressive stuff so we go here now uh skin color again they've changed it so that you basically only have that's about as not and i think that's more lighting than like that bluish tint seems to be more about lighting than anything else but they kind of limited you to real world possible values here so you can switch between a number of different skin types there you got control over the roughness of the skin it's pretty subtle and we can add some freckles in uh and control over the density of saturation so on uh skin um accents such as redness saturation and lightness available right there there and there uh so that's the skin and then we get into the eyes you've got a number of presets you can work from where we got like 12 eye sets here it's basically it's pretty subtle but if you actually come in and look at the eyes the eyes are highly detailed uh but and i think here if i go back to preview can i keep switching eyes yeah so here you can see the various different eye presets or you can control at the iris or what is that celera so you got control over the direct iris itself and you can switch out the size of it like so uh limbus you can change the darkness of the limbus which is the the outer ring there you got a decent amount of control over uh it and you can also do left and right eye so if you want to have different eyes you can do so uh we got control over here as well this is the veining in the white area around the outside so let's let's rotate our veins so there you can see so you got really fine-tuned control over the eyes the eyes are often where the uncanny valley is slammed into so that's a a nice option right there then we get into teeth that's kind of horror horror time because he opens his mouth up to do so we can open up all the way the only thing i'm really seeing missing from teeth is the ability to define cavities which is weird because they give this ability to define the plaque amount but nothing here for cavities also we've got control over the variation in teeth which basically kind of a randomizer nothing for cavities which i found a little bit shocking you also have control over them here visually this way as well and let's close this guy's mouth because yeah that's that's a little terrifying hey he's happy all right then we can come into makeup i'm not gonna play with makeup because it's really easy to mess things up and like i said once you've put it on there is no way to remove it so if i add so let's do dramatic smudge so once i've added that in i have no option to say okay i don't want makeup at all and uh transparency is the closest i can get is i can make it transparent i can go back to like a thin eyeliner make it fully transparent and basically get rid of the makeup but there's no ability to say no makeup so by the way if you're at epic games you want some feedback uh for the lipstick and for the eyeshadow stuff there's no options here also interestingly enough there is no ability to define the makeup for the eyebrows which is strange uh speaking of eyebrows we'll move on to that next you do have the ability to control them like so so we can set the color of the eyebrows here but if i wanted to have say blue eyebrows or something to that effect can't do it i can create normal skin colored ones and i can make them you know salt and pepper gray or whatever i can change the roughness of them but there is no current ability to color your eyebrows which is going to really limit a lot of especially female models like it's pretty common for uh you know blue uh dyed eyebrows or whatever something like that and really this is one of those areas where your predefined predefined settings are limiting people from being able to actually recreate certain characters seems like an easy thing to fix later on though uh in terms of head we got here we can do the hair thing so we can go from having a long afro like so come on uh there we go instantly and the cool thing is if you press play and animate any of these things uh there's full animation there's there's effects on the hair you'll see the hair actually moves around as the head moves around which is kind of impressive now again everything marked with uh one of these let's give him like a receding messy hairline instead everything that's got this marking on it is going to be lod limited uh so you you do have a lot of control over preset hairstyles well there's actually not a ton of hairstyles now that i think about it and there's not actually a ton of control over the the overall length of the hairstyle so i imagine this is one of those areas that is going to uh change in time in that regard as well you can come here and give him like a more conventional actually i think that might have been where we started from or we could give him uh give him a fauxhawk yeah let's go with the fauxhawk all right we're good to go so you got the hair there you can change again uh the salt and pepperiness of the hair and you can change the color of the hair but again there's no no values here for actual hair dye which is interesting i imagine that's going to change in time i've got control over the eyelashes pretty straight forward we got control over the beer so we can give him like a long goatee or medium curly uh not not an absolute ton of control here but there is there is some some flexibility there and then you've also got control over the color here uh once again no dyeing and it's interesting that it starts off as color as custom it's the only time it did that and we also give him so this is the bottom half we can give him the top half to go with it kind of uh like so and then uh you got control over the body now the body is where again it really sort of falls apart so i'm gonna hit the two key and we're gonna zoom out take a look at the body in this case all you really have is three types of bodies and then uh six categories three female three male so we can go short and skinny actually you know short and average short and large and then short and skinny okay that that just his head proportion is that's about as close to freakish as you can get uh but let's go back to average and average and that's about the extent of your control over the body type that part is definitely a little bit on the disappointing side and then we go over here uh you got control over the the tops so realistically you've got three settings so you can click the initial one the hoodie and basically get rid of that clothing completely i'm not going to do that on the pants or i'm going to get demonetized but you have a choice between a hoodie a sweater or a button-down shirt and then for each one of these you got control over primary and secondary color so let's go make him into freddy krueger like so that's it so we definitely need more clothing added uh it's the same deal when it comes to pants so right now he's got skinny jeans i can turn them into normal jeans or cargo pants let's give them the gap 1990s look all right there we go so we're coming into the gap and then finally for shoes uh we got boots we got casual sneaks we have flats and we have flip-flops and really that is the extent of it by the way there is a camera for each one of these things so if you actually zoom in and want to take a look it is pretty amazing the level of detail on these characters for sure uh but the uh the clothing types are definitely on the limited side and now one you're going to notice is as i'm actually working on all of this it's saving it on the fly on their servers so in theory i should be able to head over to the server and grab it at any time on bridge we've also got control over the environment that we're in so there's a studio setting it's basically the hdri map that's lighting the character indoor outdoor and silhouette so you can uh you can light your character under different settings it's it's more pronounced when you're looking at the face and the skin so let's go back here to the studio environment so you can see it's being direct lit by lights and so on um you got options to switch between lods but i think my my hair is going to cause problems here so yes you see i lost my hair but see my face we definitely lost a lot of detail but we went down to lod level six so let's go to five four three two one and then finally zero so you're noticing as you're moving between this is the limitation so led1 and ld0 are the only options you've got where you're going to keep your hair if you have that warning on there uh the groom stuff going on uh and then your lowest lods this is for like furthest away well if it had hair actually that's pretty monstrous but it'd be one of those things where as you're moving further and further away from the camera and you'll probably be able to get away with something like lod four on a mobile maybe even like on a newer mobile three or two like so and that that looks solid that looks fine uh the polygon count is probably more realistic i don't know if there's actually the ability to get the polygon count up uh i see my frame rate eti2 frames received no i don't see any ability to see what the actual polygon count is um you can turn the hair on and off and so on but no polygon count now that's that's another interesting thing and i hopefully they add that in time because it's going to be useful to know where you're at for the various different things but there are multiple lod versions available and if you stayed with the hair that is compatible you wouldn't lose it when you dropped to lod2 or below you'd still get your hair polygon model now i'm imagining over time that is all going to be fixed and realistically that is it we've created our character now the final thing to do is name it uh this guy looks like uh i don't know we'll call him reno this is reno so i just created reno so now if i go back to my metahumans we're going to basically loop back to the the character so all of that is saved server side there's no saving done on your end so now you can see we have etor tom and reno all here again lod limited every single one of them is lod limited and then once we're happy with that what we can do is generally head on over to qixel bridge and now you can see he is still there but the other thing you're going to notice going on right now is i am still generating this guy so what you need to do is pull it down into bridge and then once it is downloaded you can export it out to unreal engine it just seems like this part currently isn't working i'm depending on their server to make it work and i don't know what's going on at the same time i can also come back to any person i'm currently working on and click up start meta human creator and this will open it up on my browser we also have the ability to uh no i think this is about it so the downside here is if i want to go ahead and get a copy of reno here so we go down here we say reno and then you pick the resolutions you want so let's say i want this guy in ak i go ahead and download and then i get stuck in this generating hell so this is never ending for me right now so i can't show you my creations my glorious creations here in um unreal engine right now because they're not being created but if you do want to check some of those out as we saw yesterday there are these 50 presets uh and what you can do is grab any one of them uh i grabbed etor already for example and you can download it like so these guys are only available in full 8k which by the way turned into like i think it was a no it's over here no no it's right there there we go so go to files at torfello right here is big two gigabytes worth of stuff but you want to go ahead and check that guy out once you're ready you just do an export it exports it out to unreal engine and i have oh you have to have unreal engine running before you do an export i guess that does make sense i'm not going to bother showing you that i actually uh did hands-on with uh that the sample characters this this girl right here and what was the other one they did they released they released two early um but i i loaded those up in unreal engine earlier on you can see they're fully rigged ready to go they're really detailed characters uh but in terms of creating your own the whole mymeta humans as you can see here they all are all available in bridge you should be able to download them and then export them out but the downside here is it's still in generating phase so early access you're going to expect that kind of stuff hopefully that is resolved quickly uh you know what whenever you launch a new product like this server-side early access you're going to expect some issues and that's definitely one but i'm going to say for the most part my experience has been it's it's shockingly good there's definitely some limitations of what they can do here they need to add some makeup options for sure the clothing needs to be quite a bit expanded so we need more clothing options for sure you need the ability to set colors for eyebrows remove makeup you need to have the same sculpting ability so all of the stuff that we could do up here for modding our character this stuff this move and sculpt stuff we need to be able to do that here too i'm actually kind of shocked that that's not there but move and sculpt and blend only currently work on the face so your control over the body as it stands right now is really quite limited but the characters you could create from this thing they're really impressive and it would be interesting to get these things exported out apparently also behind the scenes it's using maya's format uh so you're kind of it's not universal like fbx unfortunately so i don't see being able to bring these things into blender anytime soon but hopefully that is another feature that is going to be added in the future but anyways that is hands-on with meta humans creator it's it's pretty impressive there's definitely some growing pains there uh hopefully this gets fixed so we can actually use our creations soon and i don't know if it's just occurring to me i know some people are having trouble logging in and so on it's early give them some time it's epic games they all usually always get this stuff working in the end and the base that they've got going here this this character generator it's just the results are pretty amazing i've got to say so let me know what you think about metahuman creator and i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 142,706

Rating: 4.8925405 out of 5

Keywords: Character, Creator, Daz, Digital Human, Epic, Epic Games, Game Development, Game Engine, GameDev, Human, MakeHuman, Maya, MetaHuman, MetaHuman Creator, Model, Review, UE4, UE5, Unreal, Unreal Engine

Id: Cbn8-x09kYs

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021