Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…Can you speak more to the creation of digital humans with MetaHuman, both on the editor side and sort of bringing it to life side? It seems like because I’ve watched a bunch of videos, a bunch of individual developers doing it, it’s not too difficult to bring a human to life using the tooling that Unreal Engine editor provides. There are two main tools. Compared to the old days where every face was created by hand by an artist from scratch, one is the MetaHuman creator tool for creating faces where you have a huge number of parameters you can adjust to create a unique human by adjusting all the different capabilities of them. You can then get that with MetaHuman creator into Unreal Engine. Then you can add all kinds of computer graphics features there in the engine. You could add clothing using the cloth simulation system and you can adjust the hair and all these other parameters on the thing. Then there’s MetaHuman Animator, a tool for animating a human based on a facial capture, which can be done on a device as simple as an iPhone and transfers the captured animation to the human you want, which is not straightforward. If the actor has one face shape and the character on screen has another face shape, the translation that needs to be done from the actor to the face is actually really sophisticated and non-obvious. If you just applied it literally, then it would be completely wrong from your point of view. Those are the main tools that people are using now. Then within the Unreal Engine, then you have a face and you can do absolutely anything you want to it. You could also, if you decide to go outside of the MetaHuman geometry pipeline, you could build your own face, like any creature of any sort, and then use the animation tools to animate it. But this is 30 years into a project that’s probably like 50 years in total to get to absolute photorealism and controllability for absolutely everything. There’s vast amounts of work still to do, and we don’t feel like we’ve solved the problem at all. We’ve just given artists a big productivity multiplier and a quality multiplier, but this is not in a state that we would say is done. Nevertheless, I’ve seen people use it really effectively. I saw it almost like plugins, maybe external services where you can get the faces to approximate the mouth movements required to speak a thing. That’s a really useful feature.…

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