With Unreal Engine 5.5 we’re excited to announce a host of exciting updates for MetaHuman.
Audio Driven Animation
Last year we released MetaHuman Animator enabling the rapid creation of high-fidelity facial animation from footage of an actor’s performance. Now we’ve expanded that toolset so you can animate MetaHumans using just the audio of a performance, making it easier than ever to bring your characters to life.
Simply select a pre-recorded audio performance and hit ‘process’ to generate full-face animation on any MetaHuman. Nothing else is needed to create facial animation with accurate lip sync accompanied by plausible upper-face gestures and animation can be produced for a variety of languages and even nonverbal sounds.
We’ve also included a batch-processing capability, which means you can create facial animations for multiple characters as well as language localisations in just a few clicks.
Head to the documentation to find out more.
Optimised MetaHumans
In March we made MetaHumans available in UEFN, to meet the requirements of building games for Fortnite this meant significantly reducing the size of the MetaHuman assets while minimizing the impact on quality.
Today we’ve applied the same techniques to MetaHumans in Unreal Engine and you’ll now find four options when exporting your character from MetaHuman Creator: Cinematic, which provides the highest-fidelity original resolution assets alongside three options with different levels of optimization, ‘High’, ‘Medium’ and ‘Low’. Selecting to export at ‘High’ quality reduces the average size of a baked MetaHuman from 800MB to 60MB with only a minimal loss in quality improving out-of-the-box runtime performance.
Documentation: Optimized MetaHuman in Unreal Engine | MetaHuman Documentation | Epic Developer Community
MetaHuman Component
The MetaHuman Component is also now available in Unreal Engine. This consolidates the most important optimization parameters into a single easy-to-use interface providing an intuitive way for you to further configure your MetaHumans to suit the needs of your project.
Documentation: The MetaHuman Component for Unreal Engine | MetaHuman Documentation | Epic Developer Community
Stereo Capture tools
The Stereo capture tools for users capturing footage for MetaHuman Animator via a Head Mounted Camera have a new home, you’ll now find these available for download as a plugin on the FAB Marketplace.
Download now: https://www.fab.com/listings/d354d596-a9a6-469a-8b27-9c327c932c8b
Groom Updates
Finally, we’ve added some new shaded eyebrows to the groom packs.
Available on MHC now: https://metahuman.unrealengine.com/