I wanted to share a music video that we just released, for our friend and amazing musician Kì-Kí Ÿågø . The video was made with Metahumans, iPhone Face Capture from the artist, rendered in Unreal Engine 5, and with most geometries made procedurally in HoudiniFX.
I’m pretty amazed with lumen lighting, and the quality of graphics we were able to achieve for the speed. Lumen really allowed us to iterate on concepts and shots quickly, without having to stress about render time.
This was also our first time using Unreal Engine ( and our first music video ) , so there was a lot of time spent learning how to use the tool. I’m very excited for future iterations where we can spend more time on the creative process:)
Wooooow SnayySS!! This is mindblowing!! you did an incredible job!!! I’m really curious about the process of how the skin is changing! especially at 1.17. Thank you!
Thank you so much for sharing this delightful, visual smorgasbord with us! In what language is the music?
You’ve done a really great job on your first go with UE! The expressive eyes on the diva (the star of the music video) and the way her outfit morphed into different shapes was otherworldly and fascinating!
How many of you worked on creating this video? Was the artist present for the iPhone Face Capture, or did the artist create the Face Capture remotely and send you the data? Was it difficult to determine the creative concept for the video? What were the first steps taken to create the music video?
Thanks:) Oh yeah of course – the skin changing is all done in the Metahuman face material. I hacked into their shader and basically used Material Attribute Blending to blend between 3 different materials, the original skin / white plastic / emissive ring. I used a combination of two texture masks to define the patterns and the blend amount.
Thank you, i’m glad you enjoyed the performance:)
The song is in Russian, and performed by Kiki Yago.
There were 3 of us total collaborating on this video – me and kif11 in Unreal Engine/HoudiniFX – and Kiki on the Face Capture performance. Kiki was in Saint Petersburg while we were in San Francisco, so she did all the face capture remotely and sent us the FBX + video recordings so we could properly adjust in Unreal. This was amazing to me, that the technology allows us to do face capture without a studio or even being in the same side of the world!
One thing I did notice was that most tutorials online for motion capture are for “live link”, this workflow doesn’t really make too much sense to me, and definitely would not work for remote collaborations.
I actually am working on a blog post describing our collaboration in more detail if you are interested!
The first steps were coming up with the 4 minute storyline which we laid out in a google doc, thinking about timecodes and the different scenes we could explore. We also had pinterest board to make sure we were on the same page visually.
Then we tackled the face capture, made sure we had a good pipeline for that and all the tech working. Once that was in, we were free to explore the visual effects and scene and start filming:)