SPEAKER: In this tutorial, we are
going to create high fidelity characters
using MetaHuman Creator.
We would like to show you two different approaches in how
to create your digital human, the first one using
blend space method, which allows you
to mix different facial features from our character sample base,
and a second one with the direct manipulation, which
allows you to freely model different region of the face
to get the desired results.
MetaHuman Creator is really easy to use.
It's made for every user, from beginners
to highly skilled professionals from the gaming and film
industry.
We can start by just briefly covering a few options
that we have here in the menu.
There is an option to change lighting set ups,
so you can see your characters under different light
scenarios.
You can also change the background color
and switch to silhouette mode.
You can quickly change the framing
to different parts of the body.
There are three levels of rendering quality,
Medium, High, and Epic.
High and Epic settings are using ray tracing
to achieve high quality.
Different levels of detail allows
MetaHumans to work well across different hardware platforms,
no matter if you're using your character in a AAA
game, Nintendo Switch, or a mobile platform.
There is also an option to see your modeling clay material.
This is extremely useful to understand
the form and roughness of the skin
without texture information.
Just to mention that you can use any character
from our present base as your starting point,
and you can blend this character with up to six other presets.
For the purpose of this presentation,
we're going to select a few characters to blend
by clicking and dragging into one of the circles
or just double-clicking on any character from the list.
Once we complete our selection, you
will get the possibility to select region
of the face you want to blend.
By clicking and holding in a selected region,
another group of rings appears.
Each of these rings will present one of the characters
in the blend space.
By clicking and dragging the center circle,
you're starting with your blend process,
and the closer we get to the circle's position
on the outer ring, you'll take more facial features
from the character you selected.
This is a pretty intuitive way, and an awesome thing about that
is that you can be satisfied with the result somewhere
in the middle.
In that way, you will add different facial
characteristics from all the characters you selected.
And any time you feel the need to have some specific details
from another character, you can easily
replace one that is already in the blend
or just add another one depending
on how many characters you have already selected.
Since our goal is to see this character growing through time,
we're currently experimenting with different options
to get skeletal structure more adequate for the age group
we are aiming for.
And here, some general knowledge of the anatomy
can be really helpful to better understand
what changes occur in different period of development regarding
our bones, skin, and other facial features.
The cool thing is that the whole process in the MetaHuman
Creator is non-linear.
You can always go back and forth between two methods of modeling
until you get the desired results.
In this case, we are switching to direct manipulation
to fine tune some details and tweak the form of the face.
Under the option for hair, you will
find a lot of amazing haircuts.
Let's try to change it.
You will be surprised how this can
affect the entire look of your character
and bring it to another context.
This obviously depends on your narrative.
As you may notice, we brought our character's
facial characteristics to a different age and likeness,
but constantly try to maintain the general look of Amelia
as a young girl.
Under the body section, we can easily change the body mass.
There is a range of different types and heights
you can choose between.
I think we got pretty good results here.
We can see how Amelia's face changed from a little girl
to a teenager, and we can see the slight changes
in the volume and form of her face from soft and rounded
to more accented and sharp facial features.
Here, in the left menu under the Skin section,
there is a texture slider, which is a powerful feature
inside MetaHuman Creator that allows
you to change the skin type.
Moving the slider from left to right,
you're going through our character base
and choosing between more younger and clearer skin
to more old and rough skin.
Beside that, there is an option to change the skin color,
tweak the overall contrast of the skin,
and change the roughness to make it more or less shiny.
As we move forward, you can see how easily we changed the age
with different texture and normal map applied
in our character.
As we mentioned before, the process is never linear,
so we continue to add more adjustments in the skin.
As we get older, some of the facial features
radically change.
For example, the skin under chin area gets stretched,
and some parts of the skull become more prominent
due to lack of facial fat and muscle relaxation.
Let's play with the texture slider
to see a full range of results we can get
and how these changes apply to our actual model.
This is the moment when you, as an artist or designer,
have to decide what works best for your context.
Keep in mind that at this point, you're
browsing through all of the database at once,
containing all genders and ethnicities.
As the database continues to grow,
we will work on ways to allow users
to filter these textures more specifically.
Pretty cool results.
This normal map and texture suits our character's face
very well.
Let's see in our feature we have under the Head option.
Besides hair color and roughness,
we can add salt and pepper as well.
This kind of detail can really add some additional realism
to our character.
After that, we are going to add another round of fine tweaking
by playing around with the markers.
Now, let's see what we got.
Let's play the animation.
Our base presets are designed in such a way
so that they contain a wide range
of facial characteristics between them.
They're not just interesting characters,
but they also have a function to give
enormous variety of facial features
that can be combined through blend space
or used as a starting point for the characters
that you wish to create.
You can change any of the features,
like skin tone and gender, regardless
of where those features were at the start.
To explain this, let's use Bernice as our starting point,
and let's try to change her into her twin brother,
a male version of this character.
It will be really interesting to see
similar facial characteristic in the different gender.
We're going to assign a short haircut just
to be able to see the form of the skull
into instantly be a more masculine look.
Then we're going to assign masculine body.
In this first step, we're playing with markers,
and we're going to accent some features typical for more
masculine look, such as strong jaw bone, accented
zygomatic bone, and prominent frontal bone.
Nice and clear skin give us the possibility
to be really focused on bone structure for this character.
And once we achieved some good results,
we can go forward and play with the texture slider
to find a skin that can better fit our context.
Under the Face section, we have makeup options as well.
We'll just turn off any option for eyes and lips.
Then we can maybe come back to explore this option later.
Real humans, or their digital doubles, it's better to say,
form the database in MetaHuman Creator.
By moving in a regional marker, you're
browsing through the whole database of scanned people.
This database includes different ethnic groups, different ages,
and skin colors.
So as an artist, you always have to pay attention
while combining those features because you could easily
run into the uncanny valley.
Not all facial forms can work together,
and usually, the eyes have to fit perfectly into the orbit
to avoid any strange-looking results.
MetaHuman Creator, at this point,
is not intended for hitting one-to-one likeness,
rather for allowing user to create
plausible realistic humans.
As the character database continues to grow,
the results you can achieve will be more and more accurate
and precise.
There is no strict formula which elements work together,
but good advice will be to keep in mind
different characteristics in the structure
of facial anatomy between different ethnicities.
Let's explore other grooming components.
Under Hair section, you'll find a variety of eyebrows.
They differ in form, and they have different breaking angles.
So it's upon you to decide what's a
better fit to your eyebrow ridge and the look
you want to achieve.
Keep in mind that one element may condition
the change of another.
So after you apply the model of the eyebrow,
you can always go back and adjust the anatomy
to make it fit better to your model.
We are going to dedicate some time
to do different fine adjustments just
to be sure that the form of our face
works well from different angles.
As we play with the markers, we always
have to keep in mind that once we apply a different normal map
using the texture slider, some different regions of the face
could be accented in a different way.
The reason is that the different normal map will always operate
on the existing volume that we define
by moving markers, but always bringing
some different features, wrinkles,
and facial irregularities.
It will be awesome for you to just move the slider
and see how different normal map slightly change and define
different facial regions.
It's highly noticeable in the area around the mouth, cheeks,
and the area around the eyes.
Under the Body section, you can find different types
of clothing that can really help
to put your character in a different context.
For all types of clothing, there is an option
to change the primary and secondary color.
Let's walk through some skin options
we have here under the Face section.
You can choose between three types of freckles
that you can add to our character,
and you will find different sliders
to customize density, strength, saturation, and tone.
This can be really an awesome trick
if you want to add some additional irregularities
to the skin and can be also combined with the skin accent
feature that you can find in the same tab.
Here, we can choose different regions of the face
and do some additional colorizing
without affecting the normal map.
This is more like a face makeup section, which
can be really used in a smart way
not only to change the color of different regions,
but you can use it as a trick to lighten or darken
some areas of the face.
For example, if you want to accent zygomatic bones,
you can just darken this area to make
the illusion of more prominent bones,
like we usually use the makeup in real life to
slightly modify the form of our face.
In a previous session, we saw transforming female character
to a male.
Since our tool database collects facial features
from many different ethnic groups,
why we just not use this possibility
to transform not only from gender to gender,
but from one race to another?
We are not limited in any phase of our work,
and this is a super awesome thing.
We can always combine features till we
don't find a perfect likeness.
You will notice that really small adjustments can entirely
change the look of your character,
just like we did here with a few slight deformation and change
of the skin color in order to get
completely different results with our starting inspiration.
Don't forget to use the multiple approaches of modeling.
You're free to go back to the blender
if you need some specific features that you can already
find in our preset base.
Beside other modeling options that we already
explored, down below in the menu,
you will also find the Move tool.
It's another super option for modeling,
which works similar as markers but moving
bigger portions of the model, like we were grabbing
multiple markers together.
This can be extremely useful when
doing some radical deformation for our skull structure.
MetaHuman Creator can really dive deep
when it comes about the eye customization, which is great
since the eye is one of the more complex mechanisms in our body.
There are options for multiple level of customization
if you don't find something that can satisfy your needs
in the set of defined presets.
Let's take a quick look on the options we have here.
There are many different displacement maps,
which modify the internal geometry of the iris.
Combined with sliders which are located above,
you'll be able to fully customize the iris
with enormous precision.
In the same tab, there is an option
to customize the eye sclera too.
We'll leave this to you to play and explore what might better
suit your character.
That will be pretty much all for this round.
We really hope you will enjoy creating your digital humans
with this powerful tool.
We thrive on your feedback, so don't
forget to leave some comments and thoughts.
There are a lot of upgrades and features
we already plan to do, so stay tuned, and enjoy creating.