Turn ANYONE into a AAA Quality 3D Character in 20 mins

today I'm going to show you guys how to turn yourself into a triple a quality 3D character using Unreal Engine and meta-humans welcome back to another exciting video everyone I like starting off my videos with some inspiration to show you what you can create with this method so let me show you this video here this is juice world and marshmallow bye bye music video directed by wolf Tech shout out to Wolf Tech his Instagram link will be down below this is using Unreal Engine which is free as well as the metahumans plugin which is free you get a level of realism with Unreal Engine which is super exciting sometimes starting with something like a character is a great heart and soul for your idea that'll allow you to go forward and keep learning different things you can do in a software so here's a behind the scenes that wolf Tech showed on his Instagram talking a little bit about the process of setting up a metahuman use live link which is built into Unreal Engine to connect and control the face of his character using his phone so at the end we'll go through and show you how to set that up now let's dive in and talk about how you can create one of these characters for yourself alright guys so first things first if you haven't already go ahead and download Unreal Engine 5. I'm not sure if this method Works in any lower versions so I'm just going to stick to Unreal Engine 5 for this if you need to download this you can use the epic games launcher there you'll find all of the installation links to set everything up so while you're downloading Unreal Engine or if you already have it downloaded make sure you go ahead and download this mesh to metahuman plugin this is again free I'll leave a link down in the description to go ahead and add it into your project and this is what will allow us to convert our mesh into a metahuman so once you have that up and running let's talk about step number one which is creating a 3D face mesh that you'll eventually convert into a meta-human now there's many ways to go about this there's some faster easier paid methods although not too expensive which is great if you're considering doing this a lot in the future may want to consider investing in it but of course there are free methods that are pretty easy as well so paid methods include using face gen I've talked about this in the past for creating 3D characters super awesome costs you around I think a hundred and fifty dollars you can also use face builder for blender if you want to stick only within blender that's also around 150 for a personal license and allows you to generate a lot of different angles for the face so again both of those are pretty simple you just start with a picture drag and drop different pinpoints and that's about it so for your free methods you can use 3D scanning now I've also talked about a ton of free apps you can use to 3D scan anything it's extremely fast and easy there's also this new Nerf technology that's been featured on Corridor crew that allows you to get some super high quality scans so that may be something worth looking into if you don't want to scan anything if you don't want to pay for the software you could always just start with a default human mesh and use softwares like Daz zbrush blender to customize the mesh to your liking so now let me show you the method I chose and how I went about creating my meta human so I use the face gen software just because I already had it makes it pretty quick and easy to do all this all I have to do is load in a picture of whoever whoever I want to create so in this case I'll make myself and you just follow the prompt and click all of these little selection points here's a preview of my face I can go to the modify Tab and change any of the facial structure if I'd like once I'm ready I can go over to file and I can export this face as a Genesis 8 mail into Daz 3D if you're creating 3D characters I recommend you go download Das again it's free they have a huge library of different props assets clothes that you can Bridge into Unreal Engine so super useful even if you're not going this route so let me hop into Daz all I have to do is Click over to the shape tab go to head and I can choose this little slider to change the facial shape of this basic Genesis 8 male into my face alright so now I'm going to click down into the surface tab in Daz and I'm just going to load the texture maps onto my face so I can click surface I can go to the editor and select face you can find the map here under base color I'll just click there and then I'll click and find my face gen folder so you can find that by going and clicking back into the runtime folder go to textures find face gen Genesis 8 male or female whichever you chose and then find the character that you saved from face gen so I'll just save this file path so I can copy and paste these all later and then I'll load in my face I'm just going to keep repeating this process for the other parts of the face like the lips the eyes Etc once I've done that I'm going to click open the Genesis 8 mail and just hide all the parts that aren't the head so that we only have a bus that they had all these other parts of the body are unnecessary for this all right looking good let's go up to file export and I'll just export this as an obj file and your export options just go ahead and check on remove unused vertices that way it is only going to export just the head so now I'm going to hop into blender just to clean up this mesh and in my case the only thing I'm really going to do is remove this sort of gray mesh over the eyes if you want you don't have to remove this and you can just change the mapping in Unreal Engine but I prefer just to save some time and just remove it so I'll click tab to go into edit mode I'll click the I vertices I'll click select linked and then I'll just delete the vertices and now I can actually see my eyes underneath there an eye color doesn't matter for now we're going to customize all that in Unreal Engine so let's go up to file export and I'll export this as an fbx and now we can fire up Unreal Engine if this is your first time ever starting up Unreal Engine it may take a little bit to compile all the shaders so just know the next time it won't take that long but either way we're going to open up a blank project you guys don't need to know anything about Unreal Engine to do what I'm about to do just follow along so in my blank project here I'm going to click in the bottom left to open up my content drawer and I'm going to create a new folder here for my meta human next I'm going to click this add button and go to import and then I'll select that fbx that I exported out of blender so I'll go ahead and click import all and then just clear these error messages open back up your content browser and now you can see my face mesh as well as all those materials that I exported out of Daz and blender so let's double click on the face mesh and check it out so now you want to make sure you have the right plugins enabled to be able to do this you want to go to edit plugins and then just search for meta-humans and make sure that's enabled while you're here you can also search up iPhone AR kit make sure that's enabled it was for me by default but if you do want to use that live link facial control at the end make sure that's checked on alright so now back to our content drawer we can right click go to The Meta human Tab and just add in a meta human identity whatever you name this will show up in the meta human browser so name it accordingly and then we're just going to double click on it so in the top left let's click this components from mesh and select that face mesh that we imported and then in the top right I'm going to change my field of view to something like 15 so that we're closer in here and then I'll just sort of use the controls here you can hold in your mouse wheel and use wasd like any computer game to control you can also use q and E to move up and down so make sure your viewer is looking face forward at your mesh then in the top left change the lighting mode to unlit if you click on body here on the left you can choose your meta-human body type which is pretty nice and then we'll go over to neutral pose here and I'm going to click promote frame once I've done that I'm going to click track active frame and that's where our mesh to metahuman plugin will kick in and it'll load the necessary tracking for your facial mesh so if you want you can click any of these green dots and move them this looks fine to me so I'm going to click metahuman identity solve once that's done we can click mesh to metahuman and this is going to send it to the metahuman backend and that's it now we're ready to dive in here and start crafting our meta human from this mesh facial shape and again keep in mind here the mesh to metahuman is only importing the shape of your head it's not importing any of the facial UVS you're going to create all of that from scratch in metahuman so you can use the link below or just search metahuman Unreal Engine on Google and you can find this website here you can do this all from the browser which is great just make sure you log in and then you should have the metahuman that we exported out of unreal right here you'll notice it has no skin set up and again so again keep in mind those UVS aren't being projected onto the metahuman we're gonna build everything from scratch so let's click edit selected and then let's go up to custom mesh and click enable editing I recommend you click duplicate and unlock so that this starting point will be duplicated you won't have to go back and do all that mesh to meta human process again now it it's unlocked and we can start actually editing this so let's go to skin and click assign and then you can choose your skin color I'm just going to turn down the freckles and then we'll go to eyes I'll choose my eye color and it's really just like any character creator in a video game so you can have fun with this process just clicking through the tabs I don't think it requires that much explanation what I am going to talk about though is trying to make this metahuman look a lot more like your subject matter so I like to use a software called Pure ref pure reference you can download that for free down below it'll allow you to Overlay some of your reference images over top so you can blend and change the facial structure a bit better so I'll drag in my front forward image I'll right click and go to mode and I'll click overlay selection and I can position this where I want next to the face or even over top of the face so let's go ahead and pick some hair again you're limited to what's inside of meta human for now you can of course add custom hair in Unreal Engine later but this should work fine for me all right so now let's click on this little sculpt tool I'm going to Overlay my picture here over top of the face you guys can hold Ctrl alt and shift and then just click and drag to the left with this pure reference to lower the opacity which is great for sort of matching up your proportions here if you guys are stuck with that whenever you download pure ref there's like a one minute little mini tutorial that'll help you out with all the controls but it's pretty simple once you've lined it up here you can right click again on that reference and lock it in and hide it from the mouse so you can change the sculpting underneath to try and make everything match up so just click sculpt grab any of those little control points on the face and just drag them around to make any adjustments that you want to the face these sculpting controls are a bit limited so again that's why we do that mesh to metahuman so that we have a better starting point for the skeleton of our face to work around and I think out of everything it got the eyes best one thing you should keep in mind here these meta humans are perfectly symmetrical human beings aren't always perfectly symmetrical so so there are going to be some differences again you're using preset eyebrows preset hair so I don't have my exact eyebrows I don't have my exact hair I am going to show you some steps later on where we can copy some aspects of our face and apply it onto our meta-human material in Photoshop so that we can get the best possible match but just keep that in mind as of now in this beta stage this is what we're working with if you want to test out different lightings you can click in the top left where it says Studio change any of these lighting presets and we'll talk about how to actually get these lighting presets in Unreal Engine later on so I think this looks pretty good I think my eyes match up pretty well with the meta human of course there are some differences which we'll try and fix later on and I think this looks pretty good again you guys can go down add your clothes add any other little detail you want use those references to try and match it to that face you're trying to create as best as possible here is my meta human and I'll just click through and add these default I'll click through these default animations you can check it out now I did run into this issue where there's a bit of tearing on the eyes if you guys have any issues with that with your custom mesh just go back up to the custom mesh section click the region where you're having the issue and just lower that Region's influence and that's it we're ready to bring this into Unreal Engine all your changes should automatically be saved so let's click back over into Unreal Engine and before I do that let's actually click back open to the epic games launcher and search for meta human Lighting in the marketplace you guys can find the project file for all of those meta-human lighting setups that you saw in the browser so go ahead and download this for free and just add it to my project and then once we open back up Unreal Engine I'll go ahead and load in that project so here is our lighting setup you guys can open up your content browser go to metahuman lighting and you see you have the ray tracing the non-ray tracing let's open up any preset you guys want and let's bring in our metahuman we're gonna go up to window and open up qixel Bridge make sure the quixel bridge is added to Unreal Engine as well super important for adding in your meta-humans so with your qixel Bridge open in the top right just make sure you're signed in and then you can go over to this metahumans tab go down to my meta-humans and you should see your creation right here so all we need to do is Click download now once that is complete you'll see the little green check mark and if for some reason this add button isn't working all you need to do is just save this project file and then reopen Unreal Engine so I reopened my project file now I can select my meta human and just click that little blue arrow to add it into the project and now you can see it in my content browser here under this new metahumans folder and it says me so now we have this me blueprint all I have to do is drag and drop this straight into the engine now before we do that let me show you an extra little tip for making your meta human look as close to your subject matter as possible I'm going to click down into the me folder and then the face folder and find this materials baked this is where you can actually find the final meta-human material it should be called Head synthesized baked you can see my face wrapped into a ball pretty creepy let's scroll down here and find the base color Channel texture so we can click the little folder to find it then we can right click on that actual material go to acid actions and then export and we'll export out that Targa image file so now you can right click on that file in your file explorer and open it up with Photoshop and you have full customization over any of these skin textures so if there's something like a blemish like on my face you can go ahead and just use your little quick selection tool select it and then click control J to put it in its own layer and then you guys can just change around the blending modes place it on the face and blend it to your meta-human skin I also stumbled across this face Builder podcast episode where they were using that face Builder plugin for blender to do this exact same workflow and they use Photoshop to completely copy and paste and blend together the real skin texture from the original subject matter onto their meta-human face so if you want the exact patterns of your skin on your face it'll make it a lot more recognizable you guys can really work your magic with Photoshop and do anything here if you want tattoos on the arms or whatever go back into Unreal Engine grab your torso material like I showed you for the face you can paste on different tattoo images so full customization and I love that aspect of it it really allows you to go in depth and change things around so let's go back to our content browser in unreal let's go to that face folder that has all those weird facial maps and I'll just click add and Import in that altered Photoshop version of the face next I'll go back to that materials and find the final meta-human baked synthesized material we'll double click on that and we'll just swap out the normal color map with our altered Photoshop color map so that we have the altered skin textures that we want and that's it let's go ahead and click save and then once you go and open up your content browser let's just drag in our meta human here this blueprint this blueprint underscore me we now have our character inside of Unreal Engine if you scroll in you can see the altered skin textures here and if for any reason if for any reason you place this wrong on your map just go back into Photoshop save it over and then reload the texture it should snap back over and we're good to go so you have your meta human and Unreal Engine now what well let's go ahead and set up a little camera so we can create a sequence to eventually render out our meta human change around the camera lens make it look more realistic and things like that so let's go and click on this little movie clipboard here and create a master sequence then you can click on this camera button to add in a cinema camera and then let's select our meta human let's go to track actor to sequence and just add me in cool so now you can scroll down and select that camera component and just go over to the details Tab and you guys can change any little detail about your camera so I'm just going to scroll in here so that I have a little better angle looking at the face so for example this manual focus distance you guys can change that value to actually put yourself in Focus you can change your aperture so you have some bokeh in the background and any other value that you can change with the real world camera you can do in Unreal Engine this lighting setup project file was created by an actual cinematographer so you have some great lighting to work with here to fully see your meta human as you guys know lighting is so important when it comes to realism so that's a huge factor into getting the most out of this meta human you guys can click back up into your outliner click on any of your lights that are already preset here like your key light your fill lights you can change the color of them you can turn them off you can add in new lights fully craft your guys's visual the way that you want to you also have this little face controller here which you'll see floating next to my head on the right you guys can scroll down find any parts of the actual face you can control the parts of the face you can keyframe them if you just want to go from one expression to the other or have your eye creepily waft over to the side like this but we want a little bit more so let me show you how to set up live link with Unreal Engine and an iPhone I'm not sure if this works on Androids I know iPhones have that lidar camera which helps with motion capture I swapped everything into a new lighting setup here again go to your plugins just make sure you have live link AR kit enabled then select your blueprint actor click add and search for live link make sure that's added in there and then under details for your actor you guys should see this live link AR face kit subject let's leave that there for now I'm going to switch over to my iPhone and just go on go on the App Store and search for the live link app go ahead and download that then I'll click the settings tab and we need to load in our IP address so you can do that on Windows by just going down and typing in your search bar CMD and clicking enter and then in your command prompt just type in ipconfig and whatever the ip4 address is that's your IP address so just type that IP address into your settings for your live link app once you've done that you should be connected so in Unreal Engine just select your iPhone from this face subject and then check on use AR kit face and there you go we're now connected in and we can control our face from our live link app so you guys can of course use this to create motion capture for your characters change around your lighting setups record these motions into your sequencer and create some really cool animations I think this looks amazing this is definitely the most realistic 3D character I've ever worked with in terms of the in terms of the depth of the facial animations in terms of the detail that meta-humans give you and just the overall power of Unreal Engine I think it's amazing I think this is the future and I think that learning now is going to give you guys a huge Advantage moving forward so have fun create your character like I said this is great for beginners because you can have zero Unreal Engine knowledge you can follow along with this now you're ready to start learning about lighting you're learning about you can learn about sequencing animation fully put together these 3D animated films music videos create vtubers do whatever there's so much possibility here and I'm super excited for all the things that are gonna Branch out of this and that's about it guys I hope you did enjoy this video I want to dive a lot more into Unreal Engine in the future so let me know if that's something you're interested in I know I've been creating a lot of blender tutorials that's been really fun as well as anything that's interesting that I see popping up with after effects of course I'm always going to cover so if you guys have any great ideas let me know down in the comments down below if you guys did enjoy consider slapping a like to help with the YouTube algorithm subscribe if you're new and as always guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and I'll see you guys [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 215,848

Keywords: 3d, character, music video, how to, tutorial, unreal, engine, max novak, blender, mesh, metahuman, AAA quality, game character, render, film, unreal animation, juicewrld, bye bye, turn yourself into 3d

Id: yN5zf-2iteY

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2022