Epic Games
Today Epic Games, the company behind games like Gears of War and Fortnite, unveiled MetaHuman, a new tool designed to help game developers build and create in-game characters in “less than an hour”.
It’s impressive and terrifying all at once. You can take a look below…
For game developers, character creation — particularly in high-end, high-fidelity productions — can take weeks or even months. Epic has designed MetaHuman in an attempt to streamline that process. According to Epic it works by “drawing from an ever-growing library of variants of human appearance and motion, and enabling you to create convincing new characters through intuitive workflows that let you sculpt and craft the result you want.”
The end result looks like an incredibly complex and malleable version of character creators you might see in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or The Sims.
Epic Games is well known for building tools for other game developers. The Unreal Engine is one of the most widely used toolsets in all of video games and regularly pushes the boundaries of visuals in video games. It’s fifth iteration was revealed in May last year and provided a glimpse into what could be possible in the coming years on consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X.
MetaHuman is getting set up for an early access program you can sign up for here.