Unreal Engine MetaHuman Creator – Unreal people have never looked more real

MetaHuman Creator is in Early Access – digital humans are coming!

A new era begins with this highly anticipated tool for Unreal Engine which is now available in early access.

It’s a new technology feature that lets us quickly and seamlessly create incredibly detailed and realistic digital humans.

You can create their clothes, hair, and facial expressions. All with a sick level of detail. In addition, it is now possible to create fully rigged digital characters in a short amount of time, making the whole process so much easier.

Using Unreal Engine MetaHuman Creator, you can manipulate facial features, adjust skin complexion, edit teeth, and select from a preset range of body types, hairstyles, clothing, and so on.

You can create virtual actors of AAA productions (meaning blockbuster games) quality in just a few hours. Then, when you finish your character, you can export and download it. Character models will be rigged and ready to animate. So smooth and simple like clicking and dragging!

Check out for yourself – Download and use sample digital characters

Apart from the creator’s early access program itself, Epic Games is also giving over 50 ready-made MetaHumans for you to download and use in your Unreal Engine projects. Just use the Quixel Bridge (Quixel Bridge is integrated into Unreal Engine 5. You can read about it in our article about UE5 Early access)

All MetaHuman realistic humans source assets can be downloaded for animating in Autodesk Maya or other applications. But remember that if you want to publish your stuff, you need to render it first in the Unreal Engine.

The technology that made it effortless

MetaHuman Creator combines technology from 3Lateral and Cubic Motion. The latter does facial animation — both are now part of Epic Games.

Earlier, it was possible to create this level of detail only through extremely time-consuming and expensive in-house methods or outsourcing. Now in just a few hours, you can have high-quality and super realistic digital humans ready.

The cloud-based app makes MetaHuman Creator possible, with all the heavy lifting of character generation and customization being streamed through high-end servers. None of the work is done on your local machine. Sounds great, huh? You don’t need specialistic hardware (so often necessary in the games industry!) to handle all the rendering and processing.

Game Developers and Artists are honestly impressed by the fidelity and accuracy of both the mesh and the rig.

Awesome built-in animation sequences in MetaHuman Creator

The software includes three built-in animation sequences.

Pick one, and your made-up digital human starts realistically yawning and puffing up their cheeks. Again, the animations are very detailed. It’s hard to believe that it all came to life within hours of your work.

3D artists can export their MetaHuman characters, edit them in Autodesk Maya or other 3D modeling software applications. Make them as unique as they want, and then animate them by hand or with their own performance capture, using FaceWare.

One of the most notable observations is that parameters have been seamlessly woven into the customization process, ensuring users stay within the realm of believability for characters. All that without ever having to worry about focusing on realism, thanks to some seriously impressive AI.

The intention of creating MetaHuman Creator

MetaHuman Creator might be perceived as one of the steps of Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s long-term vision for a gaming “metaverse” (thanks to this vision Epic Games pulled in another $1 billion in funding).

It includes many different ideas, including stuff like crossplay, but part of the plan is to produce technology that allows more people to make more content — growing the “creator economy.”

Epic Games INC claims MetaHuman Creator will ultimately let studios of all shapes and sizes more easily create the type of characters demanded by next-gen platforms and high-end virtual production while also significantly reducing the time required.

As the VP of digital humans technology at Epic said,

“Up until now, one of the most difficult tasks in 3D content creation has been constructing truly convincing digital humans. Even the most experienced artists require significant amounts of time, effort, and equipment, just for one character”. So now, after decades of research and development, that barrier has been lifted thanks to the Unreal Engine and its MetaHuman Creator.

Let us know how you feel about Unreal Engine Metahuman Creator.