Soon, realistic video game humans can be created through a web browser thanks to Epic's MetaHuman Creator tool

This story about life-like humans in video games made easy, boiled down, in 1:56 minutes.

What's the fuss?

Soon-to-be-released capabilities will allow developers to create extremely realistic human models for various media - all from within a web browser. This will make game development more efficient and affordable, but such realism may be disconcerting for some.

The situation

Any piece of 3D media content, such as video games and realistic animation, requires an obscene amount of time and effort to create. From sculpting a face to creating lifelike body movement, thousands of hours from dedicated artists are behind bringing your favorite animated characters to life.

MetaHuman Creator, a new web browser (i.e. Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, etc.) based tool, aims to challenge that notion. The tool will allow developers to create near photo-realistic 3D models of humans more efficiently, easily, and cheaply than ever before - because it's free for personal use. 

MetaHuman Creator will allow for deep character creation within numerous features such as facial features, body types, hair styles, and even clothing that can be generated in a "matter of minutes" instead of days.  Furthermore, the tool is compatible with modern motion capture and animation programs, allowing for full movement of the models.

Although the tool is not quite ready yet, an early-access program will be available in the coming weeks for those who can't wait to get their hands on it. 

Boiling it down

Have you ever watched a movie that featured lifelike animated humans, or have been face-to-face with the animatronic presidents at Disney World, and thought to yourself "something doesn't look quite right"? That's because you've been exposed to the Uncanny Valley: when something that isn't human starts to look more human-like, there is a point to where it looks wrong. This could be due to a multitude of factors such as plastic-looking skin or unnatural facial movement that can cause a sense of "eeriness" to the viewer. Although Epic Games, the company behind the program, stated they aimed to not make their models completely photo-realistic as to not invoke the aforementioned "eeriness", the Uncanny Valley is different for everyone. You can be the judge for yourself by watching this demo.

Switching gears, accessibility seems to be the name of the game for MetaHuman Creator. With its cloud capabilities (using remote computing power over the Internet instead of from your own computer) and the need for only a web browser, it seems that the need for an ultra-powerful computer to develop high-quality media is slowly getting behind us. The ceiling certainly is being broken for new talent to execute their own unique vision.

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