Character Creation: MetaThad

Exploring Epic’s MetaHuman pipeline for Unreal Engine has been a fantastic opportunity to experiement with character creation from a tech art standpoint. The process is a relativly straight forward one. Much like traditional photography the quality of your results depend on preperation, a suitably lit enviroment, linear and determanistic capture method, a strong reposit of images.

Once captured the Mesh to Metahuman interface is a straight forward, step by step process which builds boundaries such as mouth and nose locations. The option to overlay original capture footage over the mesh at the early stages of the process tends to serve as a huge confidence boost, as you’ll know whether to bin it and try again or push through to the more customisable. niche part of the workflow.

With a processed and targeted mesh you are in a position to start customising the performance and character. Enhancement from here involves exaggerating the performance to highlight any particular parts of the performance. As well as swapping the mesh for another…