i was intrigued to find out what a professional would do with dana, so i enlisted the help of swedish 3d artist anton palmqvist. he had already been experimenting with metahuman, and made these fantastic characters. oh, wow! she looks so much more real, doesn t she? it s pretty much a game changer, because it can be really, really expensive to hire a character artist to do these kind of really detailed humans before, or if you scan it yourself, you would have, like, a huge scan rig, and that s super expensive. so now, we can get to do these things just for free, like this, with the tools that they have released for us. i think people are fascinated with photoreal digital humans. like, can i create something absolutely lifelike, and how people run with that
when you use the tool, really what is happening when you pick and move a point, sometimes you might think it s like sculpting, but actually what s doing is when you move point it is finding the best fit from what we have available in that database, to where you are moving that point. people started doing work with the characters within unreal engine, and i think that s when they have really come to life actually, because when you see what a skilled artist can do, someone that knows how to work with light and composition with these characters, we have seen short films and performances. speaks japanese. i was intrigued to find out what a professional would do with dana, so i enlisted the help of swedish 3d artist anton palmqvist. he had already been experimenting with metahuman, and made these fantastic characters. oh wow! she looks so much more real, doesn t she? it s pretty much a game changer, because it can be a really expensive
new metahuman creator. whereas once only professionals could make digital characters look this real, now it s open to anyone. normally it is in the weeks and months for an artist to create a single face, but our intent was to reduce that down to minutes, so you can actually create a plausible photoreal digital human in half an hour, no problem. and in that time, this is how i made dana. so i ve got a database of over 50 characters here, and i can choose four or more even, and blend their features together. so let s do this. making dana was so easy, and it s all because of geometry and ad scanning. the team at epic scanned a diverse group of real people, allowing them to track lots of data like the topology of faces and expressions. this data was then broken down into separate components for us to choose from to make our own new person.
actually exist. i made her in half an hour. she was made using unreal engine s new metahuman creator. whereas once only professionals could make digital characters look this real, now it s open to anyone. normally it is in the weeks and months for an artist to create a simple face, but our intent was to reduce that down to minutes, so you can actually create a plausible photoreal digital human in half an hour, no problem. and in that time, this is how i made dana. so i ve got a database of over 50 characters here, and i can choose four or more even, and blend their features together. so let s do this. making dana was so easy, and it s all because of geometry and ad scanning. the team at epic scanned a diverse group of real people, allowing them to track lots of data like the topology of faces and expressions. this data was then broken down into separate components for us
and i can think of being popular in china, but it might still be a hard sell in the uk and us until some of these wrinkles are ironed out. brilliant. that was chris. now, making video game characters or virtual humans in movies generally looks like this. it often takes weeks, sometimes months, even. and so, it is usually reserved for the big triple a games or moviemakers with big ideas and even bigger budgets. but that is about to change. take a look at these. they look pretty real, don t they? but of course these are completely fabricated digital renders, made using a new creator tool from epic games. my name is kai. i am a metahuman, just like all the others. it is my first day on the job. yes, the technology used to create these characters, these digital renderings of humans, has just become a lot easier, faster and accessible to more of us. alex humphreys has been finding out more.