There hasn’t been any progress since MetaHuman animator, it looked awesome at first, as with every tech demo, but I haven’t seen any traction on that at all, it’s totally unusable for me (GPU crashes) and I’ve only seen a bunch of YouTubers make the classic “here’s my face video” and that’s it…
None of the 5.3 new features is related to metahumans, if I’m correct?
The new ML deformation sample, which is extremely nice, has a custom skeleton and doesn’t use metahuman, which is weird as you would think that that is the perfect use case for it.
The new lyra mannequin also has a very similar skeleton to Metahuman, without the extra madness, and it’s a lot easier to handle.
In general, metahumans are hard to customize, with very few body types, and hard to make use of them at scale in any video game production, might be useful for small video production NPCs…
Is there any drive to make them usable or it was just a cool tech demo?
I think that a lot of people fail to understand that Metahumans are not really meant to be characters that you can just drag&drop and use them as they are, and although there are a lot of options for them to be used in your projects ( with some degrees of optimization if you know what you’re doing ), I see the main purpose mostly to be a template for devs to use the tech they’re built ( skeletal hierarchy, reusable facial rig, corrective joints, shaders ) so that they already have a pretty good starting point to work with.
Metahuman Animator has been a huge upgrade from ARKit and a huge advantage for iPhone owners, since I also tested my good old iPhoneX and I was able to have proper data to process.
The ML deformer is very cool, and the reason why they release a dedicated plugin is for you to use it as you need…the fact that the skeleton is different doesn’t matter, because you’re required to set the range of motions in a specific way, so even if the skeleton would be the same, you still need to put some work in order to get the results you want.
Just follow the documentation, is not that hard to get what you need.
If you have good tech artists in your team, they would be able to repurpose the tech ( or part of it ) and use that with your characters, and eventually leverage the facial animation pipeline to be way easier and faster compared to standard market solutions.
Is it a glorified demo? In part yes, but it gives you a lot of tools to make things easier and less time consuming, but you still need to put effort in getting the results, because if you expect to just drag&drop them into your game and magically everything works, well you’re out of luck.
Beside clothing, more body shapes and more customization options, I don’t see any other big updates for them, and I think that they’re focusing a lot on authoring your content by using the skeletal mesh editor and control rig.
I may have my pessimistic hat on here, but I’ve seen it a zillion times before.
Release something shiny → Quietly deprecate it…
Some major red flags for me are that effectively metahumans is a very hybrid walled-garden “framework” that Epic has built outside UE, the actual editor runs on a pixel streaming service and you use it within your browser not inside Unreal Engine, while the vast majority of new features had the opposite trajectory, IE all the procedural geometry nodes (effectively Houdini inside UE), all the UV/Mesh editors, all the new Skeletal editor, a super integrated MegaScan/Bridge now actually part of the engine itself.
It just feels too weird that metahumans are left in that limbo state, also very strange from Epic to play with tricky ToS regarding who owns them, it really feels like a complete departure from their baseline, style, and way of operating their business.
We’ve embraced metahumans for our current title but I’m seriously considering switching back to something more “conventional” to avoid that weird middle ground Epic has created around it…
Mostly gut feeling impressions but I’ve been in the industry for such a long time that usually they are proving right…
Metahumans characters are content, not part of the engine, and it makes perfect sense to be able to have a preview of the character via pixel streaming and just donwload what you need.
Considering that the weight of each Metahuman is aroun 8-10GB, I’m glad that I don’t need to download the entire Metahuman Library as part of the engine.
I think “Metahumans are content” is quite wrong, in fact possibly very wrong.
They are so tight and bulletproof to UE that you can’t really use them anywhere else. This makes it not something you can bring easily in Maya/Blender/Etc to use it agnostically, you’ll be missing 90% of the cool infrastructure that makes them appealing, I’m sure it’s also against the ToS to use it “not within Unreal”.
Just to clarify, you can author them in Maya, but with the purpose to use them in UE.