MetaHuman

MetaHuman, built by Epic Games as part of the Unreal Engine ecosystem, is aimed at one specific problem: creating photorealistic digital humans without the usual mountain of character art and rigging work. MetaHuman Creator, a cloud based app, builds these characters starting from preset faces and bodies, or from a custom mesh brought in through an Unreal Engine plugin if you already have your own base model. MetaHuman Animator handles the performance side, transferring a real actor's facial performance onto a MetaHuman without requiring specialized motion capture hardware. Notably, it works with footage captured on just an iPhone, which puts high quality facial capture within reach of teams that could never justify a dedicated mocap rig. Every MetaHuman comes fully rigged and ready to use inside Unreal Engine, with support for physics based animation and the ML Deformer for more natural movement under deformation, plus eight levels of detail baked into each character so the same asset can scale from a high end PC down to lighter real time targets without separate rework.

• Category: AI Simulation
• Pricing: Freemium
• Platforms: Windows, Mac

Key features

• MetaHuman Creator, a cloud based app for building photorealistic digital humans from presets or a custom mesh
• MetaHuman Animator for transferring an actor's facial performance onto a MetaHuman, including from iPhone footage
• Fully rigged characters with physics based animation and ML Deformer support
• Eight levels of detail per character for real time performance across different target platforms

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Produces genuinely photorealistic digital humans, a meaningful step up for simulation, training, and virtual production use cases over stylized avatars
• MetaHuman Animator can capture a real actor's facial performance using just an iPhone, no dedicated motion capture hardware required
• Eight levels of detail are baked into every character so the same asset scales across different hardware targets automatically

Cons

• Tightly coupled to the Unreal Engine ecosystem, so there is limited value if your pipeline is built around a different engine
• Standard Unreal Engine terms, including its royalty model for commercial products past a revenue threshold, are likely to apply, though the MetaHuman page itself does not spell out pricing directly
• Building a fully custom MetaHuman from your own mesh requires an Unreal Engine plugin and real pipeline setup, not just the cloud app alone

FAQs

Do I need motion capture hardware to use MetaHuman Animator?

No, it is built to work without specialized hardware and supports footage captured on an iPhone.

Can I use MetaHuman outside of Unreal Engine?

MetaHumans are built specifically for the Unreal Engine ecosystem, so using them outside of it is not the intended workflow.

Is MetaHuman free to use?

The tools themselves are accessible through Unreal Engine, though standard Unreal Engine commercial terms, including its royalty model, likely apply once a project generates revenue past a certain threshold.

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