I’m working on an indie project that has a significant amount of characters, and uses a photorealistic style. An aspect of the project is interactable photos that allow you to enter them and move around in 3D space. Since the characters in these photos are simply snapshots of someone, the people are 100% static.
Using 5.5, I’ve experimented in using MetaHumans to make some test areas but found significant performance drops just from using a single one. I attributed this to the fact that even though the character is static, it’s being treated as dynamic and doing all the real-time calculations I don’t need it to do. Getting rid of a lot of the blueprint nodes helped a little, but overall it didn’t seem feasible having scenes with 10+ characters in them.
Here’s my main question: are there any alternatives to MetaHuman for similar quality and customization? I’ve done some research into Daz3D and fiddled around with the software a bit, but it’s very confusing and seems like it requires a lot of funding.
Better yet, is there any way I can customize and pose a MetaHuman and then basically force it to be just a static mesh? I’ve considered posing it in Unreal and trying to move it to Blender and then importing it back, but the process sounds tedious and inefficient. Any help would be greatly appreciated!