Kavanagh / Rossney Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

Elevate your films with cinema-quality character designs and motion capture animation
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80181-914-5
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 356 Seiten

MetaHuman Creator (MHC) is an online, user-friendly 3D design tool for creating highly realistic digital humans that can be animated within Unreal Engine (UE) and enhanced with motion capture technology. This means that filmmakers and game developers now have access to a high quality, affordable solution that was previously only available to specialist studios.
This book will focus on using UE5 and MHC from a filmmaker angle. Firstly, you'll understand how to use the online MHC to create a digital character, changing its facial structure, body type, and clothing. After that, you'll learn all the necessary steps to bring the character into UE5 and set it up for animation. Then, using an iPhone and a webcam to capture face and body movements, you'll mix these motion capture files, refine the animations using the MetaHuman Control Rig, and save these takes to be reused and edited again within the Level Sequencer. On top of that, you'll learn how to create a rendered video file for film production using both the Level Sequencer and a VR Cinematic Camera. By the end of this book, you'll have created your own MetaHuman character, as well as face and body motion capture data, and learned the necessary skills to give your future projects further realism and creative control.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kavanagh, Ciaran

Rossney, Brian

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Professionelle Anwendung Digitales Video
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Professionelle Anwendung Digitale Animation
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Programmierung | Softwareentwicklung Spiele-Programmierung, Rendering, Animation

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents - Getting Started with Unreal
- Creating Characters in the Metahuman Interface
- Diving into the MetaHuman Blueprint
- Retargeting Animations
- Retargeting Animations with Mixamo
- Adding Motion Capture with DeepMotion
- Using the Level Sequencer
- Using an iPhone for Facial Motion Capture
- Using Faceware for Facial Motion Capture
- Blending Animations and Advanced Rendering with the Level Sequencer
- Using the Mesh to Metahuman Plugin

Leseproben

1

Getting Started with Unreal

In the first chapter of this book, you will learn about what Unreal Engine is, what it is used for, and how you can start working with it. You will then learn how to set up an account with Epic Games and download Unreal Engine, before using the same account details to download Bridge, which is the application needed to start creating MetaHuman characters.

Overall, you will become proficient in installing and setting up these applications on a Windows machine.

So, we will cover the following topics:

• What is Unreal Engine?
• What are MetaHumans?
• Setting up Unreal Engine and the MetaHuman Creator

Technical requirements

Before we get started, I must remind you that this book is about extremely high-quality 3D characters so it’s important you understand this before setting up Unreal and risk being disappointed because of technical issues. This is because Unreal Engine, like any 3D graphics tool, requires a powerful machine; much of this power comes from the graphics cards.

As a result, if you want to enjoy the real-time experience of working in Unreal, you’ll need a computer that can handle the best settings and display a MetaHuman character in real time. Otherwise, you’ll experience a very sluggish machine with a tendency to crash a lot, and nobody wants this. To complete this chapter, you will need an internet connection and the minimum hardware specifications that Epic Games recommends:

• Windows 10 64-bit
• 64 GB RAM
• 256 GB SSD (OS drive)
• 2 TB SSD (data drive)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
• 10-Core Xeon E5-2643 @ 3.4 GHz

The screen grabs you will see in the pages of this book are from my own machine, which is configured as follows:

• Windows 10 64-bit
• 256 GB RAM
• 1 TB GB SSD (OS drive)
• 4 TB SSD (data drive)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
• 20-Core i9 10-900k @ 3.7 GHz

If you’re a devoted Mac user, you’re just not going to have as good an experience as you would have compared to a Windows user. Much of this is to do with Epic Games putting more time into developing the engine for use on Windows. This isn’t to say it’s not available on Mac but many of the features, particularly rendering features to achieve photorealism, are not available on Mac machines, most notably Direct X 12 and Ray Tracing Cores on the NVIDIA RTX series of GPU cards.

I’d also like to point out that there are solutions out there that will allow you to test on powerful machines. For the most part, they will get you through all the chapters of this book, except for live facial motion capture and any live body motion capture that may be featured. Therefore, if you’re on a budget, I suggest you look at some cloud computing solutions such as the following: paperspace.com.

Note

On a cloud machine, you still won’t be able to do any live motion capture, as this requires a direct interface or shared network with your machine. However, you could take advantage of the higher specification of the cloud machine for experimenting with render and lighting settings.

At this point, you may be getting needlessly worried. However, I personally tried using the tools mentioned in this book on a lower-spec machine and for the most part, I was able to work through it using very low render settings. However, I was just not able to do any live motion capture at all. Instead, I was only able to rely on library motion capture – so if you plan to learn now and invest in a newer, faster machine later, this book is certainly still for you.

What is Unreal?

Put simply, Unreal Engine is a game engine. There are many other game engines out there, but Unreal Engine is one of two that are the leading ones in the field of game development, the other being Unity. Had the people of Unity come up with MetaHumans, this book would have a slightly different title!

Unreal Engine is an incredibly powerful tool used for displaying graphics in real time. It was originally built for a PC-based first-person shooter game called Unreal and developed by Epic Games in the mid to late 1990s. In its earlier years, Unreal Engine was capable of rendering frames at rates as high as 60 fps on the CPU, giving the user a real-time experience.

However, there were many limitations, such as the frame size, limits on how many triangles could be displayed at any given time, and the complexity of the math behind the lighting. The end results were graphics that were not photorealistic but were a significant improvement on other game engines.

As GPUs improved over time, so did Unreal, as it was able to migrate a lot of its mathematical computations over to the GPU. As a result, the engine was able to rely on hardware that was specifically designed to calculate 3D rendering faster, and many features were developed to introduce photorealistic lighting solutions that were previously only available on traditional CPU path-traced solutions found in film and TV.

Path-traced or ray-traced rendering solutions involved very complex mathematics that would trace photons from the pixel of the final render through the CGI camera and around the scene. This tracing was incredibly time-consuming and required a lot of processing power just to deliver a single image. Therefore, conveying a sense of motion or real time was impossible for photorealism.

Because of very recent innovations, Unreal Engine is now being used to generate photorealistic renders in real time and we can see the result of that in Disney’s The Mandalorian. The company behind the real-time environments, StageCraft Industrial and Light & Magic, worked together to create LED backgrounds that displayed the output of scenes within Unreal Engine. In addition to supplying a photorealistic background, the LED backgrounds would also light the real actors, adding even more realism.

I expect that if you are a complete newbie to all of this, you may be scratching your head thinking: More generally, it is a software application designed for building games that render graphics in real time. For games, Unreal is used for the creation of the following:

• User functions
• Game logic
• Environment design
• Animation
• Real-time rendering of what the user sees

Be it input from a mouse click, an Xbox controller button, or an Oculus headset, this user input affects how and when characters move and what is being displayed at any given time.

Ultimately, this book is about getting you up and running with your own characters and animating them how you want them to be animated even if you don’t have an art background or character animation background. Exciting stuff? I think so.

Next, let’s think a little more about how we are going to create those characters.

What are MetaHumans?

MetaHumans are very complex characters that have the capability of looking photorealistic and moving realistically. They are templates to be edited by users and artists. The editing of the character templates takes place on a web browser and allows the user to see their character design being displayed in extreme realism.

A lot of the development of MetaHuman Creator is around real-time rendering. Typically, the shading of skin for CGI characters involves a substantial amount of CPU processing, particularly for high-detail areas, such as subtle reflections, pores, and tiny hairs or fuzz. The MetaHuman skin shaders are designed to work in real time within Unreal Engine by harnessing recent technological hardware advances, such as real-time ray-tracing in NVIDIA RTX cards.

In addition to photorealistic skin shaders, MetaHumans have a network of bones and blend shapes that allow for incredibly intricate and powerful facial puppeteering, as well as the ability to be combined with facial and body motion capture, all in real time within Unreal.

Now that you have a good understanding of Unreal Engine and MetaHumans, we will get the software up and running on your system so you can start using Unreal in the next chapter.

Setting up Unreal and the MetaHuman Creator

Before we can start using Unreal Engine and MetaHumans, we need to do some setup. In upcoming sections, we will do the following:

• Create an Unreal account
• Download and install Unreal Engine 5
• Launch Unreal Engine 5
• Install Quixel Bridge
• Boot up MetaHuman Creator

So, let’s get started.

Creating an Epic account

To get started with Unreal, the first thing you need to do is create an Epic account. To do this, follow...

Über Autor(innen)

Rossney Brian:

Brian Rossney is a Creative Director and VFX Supervisor at Rossney Pictures. With 22 years of experience working in the film and TV industry, Brian has specialized in post-production and digital visual effects. He has produced commercials and TV opening sequences using 3D animation tools and 3D nodal based compositing applications. With a thorough understanding of the VFX and 3D animation pipeline, and live-action film producing and directing, Brian has lectured at Dublin City University and Galway Film Centre, and had worked as a VFX supervisor for Hallmark and Maravista. He is also the creator of two short films – they are called ‘Apetito', using Unreal Engine, and ‘1976', using Unreal Engine and the MetaHuman Creator.