[UE5 - Android/iOS] Create custom Metahuman that looks like you!

hi everyone in this video i'll show you how you can meta humify yourself if we can say so meaning that we are going to create a custom meta human that looks like you i've been exploring various softwares and i made a lot of tries to figure out a workflow with the least equipment required and when i say a lot of tries i mean a lot the good news is that now i can show you the simplest way to achieve the result the process is broken down in five stages pictures acquisition 3d model generation 3d model preparation and export meta-human identity creation meta-human finalization the first two stages are strictly correlated since the way you take pictures depends on how you choose to generate the 3d model what i mean is that you can generate the 3d model with classic photogrammetry or not classic photogrammetry techniques give the best results but are quite hard to apply on a budget in fact you should have multiple cameras that shoot peaks at the same time from different angles this guarantees that the subject is in focus and in the same pose in all lame images softwares like reality capture meta shape or mushroom then let you create an almost perfect 3d representation of the subject i tried this way but as i said it's quite difficult to obtain good results with just one camera but you are free to try this way as well what we are going to do instead is to use an application called polycom it doesn't matter if you have a phone with android or ios since we'll be taking advantage of the web version of it using the pro version of the app that has a free trial of 14 days polycom is a really good because is way more forgiving than standard photogrammetry software and even if its results are not 100 accurate there is a perfect balance between ease of use and quality for what we are doing here so without further ado let's begin to create an account i suggest you to use the app website because doing so you can have a 14 days free trial if you go down the same procedure on your phone you will only get seven days free trial we are now ready to take pictures this part is the most important because it lays the foundation of all the subsequent steps i advise you to take your time and shoot carefully the pictures the best thing would be to have someone to take pictures of you because it reduced the chance of getting blurred or cropped pictures in any case if you are going to use your phone camera i suggest you to use a selfie stick and enable the shake reduction to avoid blurry pictures the pictures should look something like this and as we'll see taking pictures of your back is not strictly required but the important things are to have an even illumination and to take pictures from different angles from one side to the other you can also take some close pictures just be sure to have at least 50 percent overlap as polycam suggests if you have a long bird it will cause problems because the bird will be included in the model and more post-processing is required to skip the pros processing the only way is to shave or trim it same goes for long hair but in that case the solution is simple tie your hair so your face doesn't get covered after taking the pictures you can upload them to polycom from your phone or computer i found that having a natural background and using the object mask option gave me the best results if you have pictures without a natural background you can remove it using photoshop or similar software like i did keep in mind that this doesn't necessarily apply for every case so feel free to experiment when you are happy with the result open the capture and download the generated model by clicking on the export button and select the format you prefer i chose gltf we are going to import the downloaded model in blender so fire it up and go to import gltf to better view the model you can set the lighting visualization on matcap what we need of the model is just the front part of the head and its texture so we can proceed to delete all the rest but first we have to rotate the model since polycom tends to generate models with a funky orientation let's go in front view by pressing one on the keyboard and rotate the model to align it to the view then we enable x-ray or wi-frame mode to select all the bottom vertices and delete them if there are unwanted vertices on the top we do the same next we go on the side view by pressing 3 on the keyboard to remove unwanted parts as well if present often polycarp models have disconnected parts to check these in edit mode you can go on select all by trade non-manifold if there are disconnected parts selected merge them by clicking on mesh merge by distance now the model can still be known manifold but is fully connected and that's important because using modifiers to a disconnected mesh will generate problems if the model came out with a rough surface you can use the corrective smooth modifier in blender to clean the model a bit you may need to play a bit with the sliders to achieve the desired result in my case with this last model the surface came out really smooth i had just to even out the bird and for that i use the sculpting tools in blender to achieve a very good final model [Music] now you can see why it's so important to have good pictures in the beginning so that this phase is shorter [Music] when you're happy with your model you can proceed to export it in fbx format by going on file export fbx we also need textures along with the model and you will see why in a bit so we set path mode to copy and we click the embed texture button then we select the mesh in object types smoothing should be set on face and we are going also to uncheck bake animation we now can finally click export fbx now before jumping in a real engine 5 be sure to have the metahuman plugin downloaded you can find it in the marketplace by just searching for metahuman after that we can create a project i'm going for the third person template and then let the engine start when the project opens the first thing to do is to enable the metahuman plugin by going in the plugins window and search for metahuman select it and restart the engine back in the project right click in the content browser and select metahuman metahuman identity this will create an identity for our character it will be empty of course and we need to link it to our imported mesh speaking of that we need to import the fbx we created before so just drag and drop it in the content browser and leave the standard settings then click import all to link the meta human identity with the mesh we need to open it click on components from mesh and select the mesh what we'll be doing is capturing the face using the automatic tracking and epic suggests to set the field of view to 15 degrees then we align the camera so that the face is looking directly at it now we promote this view to a so called frame by clicking on notre pose and then promote frame the blue bar at the bottom of the window will indicate that the currently flame is active we can then click track active frame and let the engine analyze the model and its texture to track the features of the face if the geometry and the texture of your model are good the tracking will be really accurate as we can see here the tracking of eyes and mouth match quite good with the model we still need a body for our character so select body on the left pane and choose one of the six presets currently available for metahumans now we can click metahuman identity solve on the top bar and when it's done we can finally click the mesh to metahuman button this part can take a while from 2 to 10 minutes so go have a cup of coffee and when you're back you'll see a window like this saying that your metahuman has been created okay so we are at the final step that is in my opinion the best one because we finally see the result coming to life open quicksort bridge from the engine by clicking the add content button and selecting quicksort bridge then we go in metahumans and click my metahuman here we can see our new metahuman identity that has just a logo as a preview since we have created it but not initialized it to do so we click on it and start the meta human creator app [Music] when it's loaded we can use the sliders in the first section to reduce the increasing in volume generated by our model to the base meta human shape i always set the top parts of the head to zero because the hair and the 3d model imperfections tend to just ruin the model for the other influence sliders is up to you it really depends on how good is the model generated in polycom of course the important thing is to try to keep the character as close as possible to the scanned subject our character still looks like vision when gets killed by thanos so let's give it a more human look by going on skin and assign it a color you can also modify the model by enabling the editing of the mesh it will ask you to create a copy of the character before making any changes to the geometry that could be a good idea if you want to experiment a bit [Music] next you can go through all the other customization for the eyes teeth makeup hair and so on until you are happy with the result [Music] that's all guys i hope you enjoyed this video and found it helpful somehow if you did remember to like and subscribe to support my work speaking of that i have some ideas for future videos but if you want to give a suggestion about which topic to cover write that in the comments below well it's time to go now see you on the next one cheers

Channel: Gono

Views: 20,525

Keywords: metahuman, unreal engine 5, ue5 metahuman, ue5 tutorial, unreal engine metahuman, unreal engine android, ue metahuman

Id: 7RKITpBZN-s

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 19 2022