Do you need a human actor for metahuman?

I’m trying to gauge if there is a need for basically a mocap actor to help with metahuman facial expressions or movements. I’m a voice actor by trade, but recently hired to do some facial mocap using meta human face link.

Is there a need for actors to create facial expressions that you can lay your own character on top off? Or does the program come with premade ones that everyone is happy with? What about dialogue? Would you hire somebody to speak the lines through face link so it would sync up better? What about a pack of pre-recorded expressions you could use?

If anyone could help explain why a human actor is needed or not needed for metahuman characters, please let me know. Thanks!

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Hey there @TamaraRyanVO! Welcome back to the community! So facial mocap actors are becoming more popular as time goes on as you can often get a much better theatrical performance than manually animating with significantly less effort. Imagine how quick 10 takes of you saying a phrase is + a bit of cleanup time from an animator vs manually keying full animation. Another alternative is automated systems that can take audio and use the phonemes (basically animation poses for common sounds) to handle facial animation.

Thank you

Thanks, so if I want to offer services as a mocap artist specifically for MetaHuman animator, what would my main keywords be? Do I just call myself a mocap artist and leave it at that? I plan to only use Live Link Face.

That’s a great question! Though I’m usually not on the hiring side so this is pure conjecture, because the term is broad I believe it should be accurate to use Motion capture Artist in this case if you are able to handle all that entails, though you will eventually branch out into other software by necessity as most mocap done in Unreal is still mostly brought in from third party programs.

Keywords will mostly focus on your skillset, I’d go with Mocap Actor if all you do is VO and acting without rigging/cleanup skills, but if you’re capable in those arenas Mocap Artist is great.

I do hope we get a more hiring sided individual to chime in here, for their take. As a developer my work is usually rather divorced from the technical art side.

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