Epic's Hyperrealistic MetaHumans Can Soon Be Animated Using an iPhone

During its State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023, the company showed off new animation tools that make it possible to create realistic facial animations using only video captured from an iPhone. The Verge reports: Epic showed this off with a live demonstration featuring the actor behind the upcoming game Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. It was a short clip, with the actor speaking directly into the camera, but it appeared to be rendered both quickly and accurately. Even more impressive, the company then showed off the same animations captured onstage used to bring another MetaHuman character to life. The animator is launching this summer. Epic's MetaHuman Creator was announced in early 2021 to streamline the process of making more realistic human faces, body movements, and facial animations.

The resemblance to actual humans...

[iMadeGhostzilla]

... is uncanny.

Seriously, when the cost of creating something goes to zero, so does the appreciation of it.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Seriously, when the cost of creating something goes to zero, so does the appreciation of it.

Good. We shouldn't be needing to appreciate technological efforts going into game rendering. We should be focusing on the quality of the content / gameplay / story. Any effort to make amazing hyper realistic graphics easy is welcome so finally studios can stop blowing their entire budget on graphics and actually pay writers, voice actors instead and dare I say it, QA testers instead.

Hellblade?

[Yo,dog!]

I don't want a "hellblade", let alone two.

No, they can be animated based on iPhone video

[Goldenhawk]

They can be animated USING a very powerful (4090) workstation, BASED ON an iPhone video and stills. The iPhone won't do the animation. There's a HUGE distinction.

Re: No, they can be animated based on iPhone video

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Facial capture in the past has required specific cameras mounted a specific way with performers marked up a certain way and required animation cleanup later. That's why the iPhone vid is a BFD.

The article wasn't very good at explaining this but it could potentially be like what happened when 3d animation tools became productive on off-the-shelf PCs instead of $50k custom hardware.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Which is what is said in TFS, and no where in the title does it imply the software suite runs on the iPhone. Honestly did you read this as the iPhone doing the actual rendering rather than being a replacement for motion capture? Because that is really the obvious interpretation of the title.

Re:

[locopuyo]

It's good enough to fool people if you play to it's strengths. Watch The Matrix Awakens presentation they did a year ago. Even if you rewatch it and look closely you probably can't tell when he's real and when he's a metahuman.

Persona.

[HybridPersonality]

It will be interesting to see if they develop a personality.