unreal engine [UNCONFIRMED] Making photorealistic human models for free in hours is now possible, thanks to MetaHuman Creator

[Ash_Kechummm]

I don't really know if this comes under tech news, so it's okay if the mods remove this post for not following guidelines.

 

Summary

So Epic Games has now released a new web app called MetaHuman Creator, which allows artists to create photorealistic human models in hours (or even minutes), by using a large (and ever-growing) library of pre-built models and using AI to blend between them and customise them.

 

Quotes

Quote

 MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed app that takes real-time digital human creation from weeks or even months to less than an hour—at an unprecedented standard of quality, fidelity, and realism. When your character is finished, you can export and download it, rigged and ready to animate in Unreal Engine.

 

My thoughts

As a person looking to get into game development, Unreal Engine seems more and more enticing, especially if like Quixel, MetaHuman Creator is also made to be free for Unreal Engine users (this hasn't been confirmed yet, it's just my guess).

 

 

Sources

 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/digital-humans

Edited February 11, 2021 by Ash_Kechummm
added "unconfirmed" before title because epic themselves haven't said anything about it being free yet

[Quackers101]

Siri is that you? Zoom liking the meta.

Still got ways to go, fun, but when it will be ready for being more commonly used and not break your hardware?

Also epic will buy up a lot, I guess unity does sort of the same to include more features and helping the market and creation.

 

Soon metahuman will replace your neighbour and the service industry, supported by the meta-spot.

[Ash_Kechummm]

31 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

Still got ways to go, fun, but when it will be ready for being more commonly used and not break your hardware?

if you mean application into games, then it's happening soon: Senua from the upcoming series X title Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is made using the tech behind MetaHuman Creator.

 

[Taf the Ghost]

As much as Epic spends a lot of time being annoying, their tech side for game engine stuff is world-class. Their PS5 demo of new tech really is important, and it's great to see them bringing large data set tech to more direct applications. Because the Art Pipeline is what has really ballooned game development's costs. I hope it works as well as the idea presents itself.

[Kisai]

Every time something like this comes out, people go "whoa, cool, how long till it's seen in games", and then never is seen in games.

 

Like the visuals seen in the video demo, aren't particularly different from where Squaresoft was in "The Spirits Within", which was a film, not a game. The game of that year? 2001 Final Fantasy X for the PS2. The only thing that makes this interesting is that it's potentially available to ALL games using UE, not just devs who pay for an expensive library on top.

 

It's fine though, if we get to a point where a video game engine can surpass what a GAN can do, player customization might actually reach a point where you aim a webcam at your face, and the game can figure out what you look like, and you can just tweak it from there so you can have a true avatar in the game. That can bring an entirely new experience for VR, and remote meeting spaces.

 

With that said, it would impress me more if they could use the same technology to generate 2D (not merely cell shaded 3D) worlds and characters that rival cartoon/comicbook/manga/anime drawing styles. That would lower the barrier to entry for storytelling. 3D looks fine when it's in a game, but it never looks realistic enough, and even this demo has various hallmarks of not being real, like being too perfect and too clean.

[Quackers101]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

It's fine though, if we get to a point where a video game engine can surpass what a GAN can do, player customization might actually reach a point where you aim a webcam at your face, and the game can figure out what you look like, and you can just tweak it from there so you can have a true avatar in the game. That can bring an entirely new experience for VR, and remote meeting spaces.

Think there was some AR stuff that did something like that, and those systems that used depth information to build models etc.

[StDragon]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Every time something like this comes out, people go "whoa, cool, how long till it's seen in games", and then never is seen in games.

At the very least, it would be nice for game developers to have access to this via an API. For example Cyber Punk 2077 could generate random characters and then roll them up into the next DLC. No need for the standard batch of cookie-cutter models anymore.

[Ash_Kechummm]

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

Every time something like this comes out, people go "whoa, cool, how long till it's seen in games", and then never is seen in games.

I don't mean to sound rude, but I haven't actually seen this happen before? (maybe because I have a very bad memory)

 

Could you please give examples?

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

Like the visuals seen in the video demo, aren't particularly different from where Squaresoft was in "The Spirits Within", which was a film, not a game. The game of that year? 2001 Final Fantasy X for the PS2.

I mean it does follow the thumb rule I've observed over the years; real-time rendering tech for interactive media (aka game graphics) are approximately 20 years behind the kind of rendering tech seen in CG in films (which is then about 5 years behind the cutting edge rendering technology in papers)

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

it would impress me more if they could use the same technology to generate 2D (not merely cell shaded 3D) worlds and characters that rival cartoon/comicbook/manga/anime drawing styles. That would lower the barrier to entry for storytelling.

That actually sounds like a good idea! (Although now that I think about it, we're gonna have to use a GAN for that, there's no hardcoded algorithm that can simulate 2D human animation imo)

Edited February 12, 2021 by Ash_Kechummm
english is not my first language

[Ash_Kechummm]

4 hours ago, StDragon said:

At the very least, it would be nice for game developers to have access to this via an API.

People are saying (once again, unconfirmed) that you'll either be able to download it for use in unreal engine for free, or download a maya project for use in other engines (which would cost money), so although it's not an API, it's pretty close in convenience. Plus this is a manual program (you sculpt the character yourself), not a "random character generator", though I'd like to see one of those too.

Edited February 12, 2021 by Ash_Kechummm
spelling lol

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Ash_Kechummm said:

I don't mean to sound rude, but I haven't actually seen this happen before? (maybe because I have a very bad memory)

 

Could you please give examples?

 

The FF7 PS3 tech demo was another example of real-time game graphics shown that never actually wound up in a game. The PS4 ff7 remake still wound up being scaled back. I know I keep using Final Fantasy here as a reference point, but that's the only series that seems to aim directly at bleeding edge.

 

Here's a another take on "making faces" https://facemaker.uvrg.org/ , this is entirely in the browser.

 

FFXV (That's 15, not 14) has a multiplayer mode that also has a face generator in it. Assuming you can get out of the generator at all with anything less than a high end GPU.

 

The thing people seem to fail to understand is that the game models you see in a game only have polygons in the thousands, not the millions. There's a lot of smoothing tricks involved to make them higher resolution than they actually are. Like the more recent VRChat stuff straight up tells you 20K per character, because you might actually be in a room that has 100 people in it.

 

If you want super-realistic graphics in a game three things have to be true:

a) The GPU power has to be high end. Most consoles and PC's are not. Your average GPU according to Steam is a Geforce GTX 1060, which just barely hits 1080p60 on games 3 years old.

b) The amount of other details must be minimal, so a high poly model might be good for a cutscene, but you are not going to see a high poly model also be a player model. This is one reason why a lot of "cutscene" modes in games are that, they remove all the other player and NPC's not needed for the cutscene.

c) For MMO games, they also need to make the worlds smaller and reduce draw-distance. Most non-MMO games actually design their worlds around the player's perspective so they can actually just cut detail out of things that the player is never intended to see. But in a MMO, where skins or cosmetic options are heavily used, your game engine doesn't even have the luxury of reducing the game model complexity because you could easily have 100 characters in front of you. FFXIV actually seems to have a draw limit of about 50 characters. If you're in an area that has 100+ characters (eg a housing area or a market area) and everyone else will pop-in/out as the camera moves and more players enter the "draw distance".

 

But how often are you actually looking at players that closely? Really, only during cutscenes. Most games don't let you get that close. Games like the FarCry series , you only see these higher detailed characters in cutscenes. When it switches back to shooting cannon fodder, they're just again your typical rubber-faced nothing-character. (FarCry 6 apparently comes out in 4 months) the only characters with detail are those that are directly involved in the story.

 

[werto165]

I have got the download started, a nice 4.4GB  see how it'll run on a 3080  

[RejZoR]

Would be nice if we had such procedural NPC generator in games, so you'd really never see the same person in an open city twice.

[AlwaysFSX]

On 2/12/2021 at 2:36 AM, Kisai said:

FFXIV actually seems to have a draw limit of about 50 characters. If you're in an area that has 100+ characters (eg a housing area or a market area) and everyone else will pop-in/out as the camera moves and more players enter the "draw distance".

Hunt trains where you only see people in a 1'x1' area.

[RejZoR]

I don't get it why developers don't use fadein instead of popin. If something pops into existence it's an annoyance. If it gradually fades in at a long distance, you probably wouldn't even noticed it.

[Stahlmann]

16 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I don't get it why developers don't use fadein instead of popin. If something pops into existence it's an annoyance. If it gradually fades in at a long distance, you probably wouldn't even noticed it.

That's what Witcher 3 did for most small objects that are not rendered at far distances. They gradually fade in as you get closer and thus the player likely does not notice any fade-in at all. In fact, most AAA open world games do it like that. Most games that have pop-in models are older and from what i remember i think it's actually very common im MMOs. But i've stopped playing them a long time ago, so i can't say how it is nowadays.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

That's what Witcher 3 did for most small objects that are not rendered at far distances. They gradually fade in as you get closer and thus the player likely does not notice any fade-in at all. In fact, most AAA open world games do it like that. Most games that have pop-in models are older and from what i remember i think it's actually very common im MMOs. But i've stopped playing them a long time ago, so i can't say how it is nowadays.

MMO's tend to "pop in" because the server isn't always sending data for every character. eg people logging in and out are are also contributing to it.

 

In FFXIV there is one large map called Eureka which is actually an instanced map and every player on it can quite literately be in the same place at once, and the input lag is (because too many people are attacking the same mob) and pop-in is quite hilarious in those hunt trains.

[Quackers101]

popin can also be an issue with hacking, so if it never loaded, you hopefully can't target or use or have an advantage... hopefully.

A bit like CSGO, were you don't want it to load until they are in close area of an opening. So players stay unknown, although there are ways one can go around this.

From PvP games to PvE games, different use cases.

[BuckGup]

Porn

[Ash_Kechummm]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

Porn

I don't think this is related to the current discussion

 

 

The only reason I'm not reporting this is because you're an active member, so there must be a misunderstanding

[Quackers101]

2 hours ago, Ash_Kechummm said:

I don't think this is related to the current discussion

Maybe, maybe not.

But such features can be a great way for porn related content, and the business around such content as it will grow more and more digital, when it gets more realistic? While it might not be the best to start on that topic. If we think about when the internet first started around the idea of avatars to things like Vtubers and VRchat and the like, to what people can do in softwares like blender.

 

Just don't deepfake it all, fake the deeper into a fake hole of fakeness.

[Ash_Kechummm]

Ah, that makes sense

 

Just reading one word wasn't enough for my non-existent brain to realise what he was talking about

 

 

Sorry!

 

[Serin]

Lots of people all like 'I want this in cyberpunk'
No, you super really don't. This is a full on tool for character creation, not a 'character creator'.
Being able to sculpt a characters face to the level of detail it looks like this thing'll provide is just... Do you want your audience to be completely lost? Because that's more or less what you'll get.

It looks fantastic, and the iphone depth cam integration is... A bit special. But it looks to be more of a professional tool than something you might find actually in a game.

[Quackers101]

8 hours ago, Ash_Kechummm said:

Ah, that makes sense

Sorry!

 

No need to be sorry, we just made an excuse to talk about it

[SADS]

When i see these sorts of things and how realistic they look, I just can't help but think about how its going to be used maliciously in the future.

 

When scammers are easily enough able to click a button, generate a human looking 'filter' or rendered face to speak to people, then your grandparents are going to be much more easily convinced to open their bank accounts to people.

 

What about the deepfake route too, able to create fake news videos of practically anyone, saying practically anything and 99% of the people watching can't tell its faked.

 

I just can't help but feel that at the moment, the internet is a place that just cannot be trusted very much.

Feels like its just getting worse and worse, too many people are hooked on social media and too many people are just not savvy enough to spot a lie or manipulation tactic.

That's without the fact that 99% of people are happy to accept all of their data being mined from them.

[BuckGup]

20 hours ago, Ash_Kechummm said:

I don't think this is related to the current discussion

 

 

The only reason I'm not reporting this is because you're an active member, so there must be a misunderstanding

I commend you for actually reporting content lol but it's 100% related. Some of the biggest driving forces in technological innovation is porn. This is 100% going to be used to create celebrities and people will make people they know to virtually have sex. 

We are approaching a virtual social revolution as I think within the next 30 years virtual spouses, dogs, kids, and other living beings will be accepted as normal. This is the baby steps leading to it.