- Creating a 3D model of a person from scratch is tough.
And while modeling software and hardware
has improved throughout the years,
it still takes a ton of experience
and a lot of work
to take a collection of basic shapes
and turn it into a photorealistic person.
But, hold on a second.
What if we started with a finished person instead
and then just tweaked them to look different?
Well, that sounds kinda like the character creation tool
in your favorite RPG,
and those are often pretty decent.
But, they're always highly limited
in terms of their sculpting options.
That is, until now.
Meet the MetaHuman Creator.
Want a voodoo doll of your boss to kick around
with ragdoll physics?
Easy! Want a photorealistic digital representation
of the father you never had?
Got you covered. ( background laughter)
Want a waifu to
whatever people do with those?
Ew didn't need to know,
but you got it.
Wanna know about our sponsor Ridge Wallet?
Ridge Wallet wants to redefine-
No, Nay, have redefined the traditional wallet
with their compact frames
and RFID blocking plates.
Keep your wallet bulbs down
and use offer code, Linus, to save 10%
and get free worldwide shipping.
(upbeat music)
With the Metahuman creator,
Epic has set out to give developers the ability
to not only make character models quickly
but to a high level of detail.
Now, it hasn't been officially released yet,
but you can request access on their website,
wait a few days and,
(table banging) bada bing, bada boom,
You've got your very own NPC factory at your disposal.
The big question, however, is,
is it as easy to use as they say.
To find out, I will be going mano, a mano
against our logistics manager Mathias,
who has a background in 3D modeling.
Yeah, granted, he leans more towards architecture
and structures,
but he does have experience with character modeling as well.
Anyway, if Epic did their job right,
none of that should matter.
I mean, this looks pretty easy, right?
Who needs design school
to make a fully rigged and clothed human?
When you've got the power
of unreal engine for.
Speaking of clothing,
too bad we can't clothe our models in LTT merch.
That would be a fun epic collab.
For the next best thing.
Go to lttstore.com
and clothe yourself with them.
Now, each of us will have 20 minutes
to turn the same starting Metahuman
into a digital version of
yours truly.
Neither of us have touched the tool yet.
And we'll both be using the same frontal
and three-quarter view profile pictures as references.
Does this seem reasonable?
- Yep.
- How much time would it normally take
to create a fully rigged and clothed person?
- Depending on the complexity.
Anywhere from a couple of hundred hours
to a couple thousand.
- Fortunately, my secret weapon
is I have the advantage of seeing myself
in the mirror every morning.
- [David] Doesn't he get to see you every day?
- I don't think anyone's gonna call that an advantage.
(Linus and David laugh)
This is it?
- [Plouffe] Yeah.
- There's no like tutorial mission?
- [Plouffe] No.
- We just go now?
- Yeah.
- Oh my gosh,
- I'm ready.
- [Plouffe] Matthias seems confident.
- How long do we get?
- [Plouffe] 20 minutes.
- Okay.
- [Plouffe] And start.(chuckles)
- Normally, when we do these kinds of challenges,
no matter how much experience I have,
I'll just
come in overly confident.
(Lunis snort laughs)
Today I got nothing.
I got no swagger.
Face blend.
What is blend?
Oh my God,
you take multiple characters
and like put them together.
And she's like looking at you and stuff the whole time.
Holy crap.
I am
screwed.
- I'm pretty confident about this.
It's relatively intuitive.
It's pretty, you know,
I just point, click, drag.
- What the hell is happening?
Okay. Well that...
How do I make my nose pointer? Oh.
- [Plouffe] Linus, do you have any prior experience
with modeling programs?
- [Linus] Absolutely. Zero prior experience.
Ah.
- [Plouffe] What about in-game character creation tools?
- In-game character creation tools.
I usually just blitz through them
as fast as possible
because I play games to play games,
not to stare at in-game characters.
- [Plouffe] What do you think your chances are
of beating Matthias?
Or at least matching him?
- My chances are basically zero.
Thank you for making me say that out loud.
(Plouffe chuckles)
I still haven't figured out
how to change skin color at all.
So that's a challenge.
(Linus heavily grunts)
(Linus laughs)
(Plouffe laughs)
- Well that aint it chief.
(sniffles)
Okay.
What color is my skin?
I don't know, never really thought about it.
(Linus chuckles)
- I went to school for 3D animation,
mostly for cinematics.
So you know, like cartoons and whatnot,
unfortunately I never actually got a chance to
do it,
professionally at least,
- Until today.
- Until today. Yeah.
- [Plouffe] It's been a few minutes.
What do you think of the UI?
The user interface.
- It's
great.
But I'm having trouble.
How about that?
Okay, I have dark brown eyes apparently,
my eyes are dark.
Okay.
Oh God, (background laugher)
That smile.
I don't look like that.
Okay, my teeth are mostly white-ish, I think.
But they're a little yellow.
Okay. Makeup.
Oh God, no, we don't need any makeup.
How do I turn it off?
Thin liner, soft smoky.
Okay, It needs more off buttons.
'Cause, this has eyeliner on, and I don't want it.
So do I just press X?
No. Oh God.
- [Plouffe] Matthias, How does this compare to
Maya or Blender or something of that nature?
- The difference between say this and Maya
is Maya, you have to drag around individual vertices
and other features,
and you have to like place
individual polygons.
Where this is just, you know,
nice click and drag and move it all around.
- Okay, color.
Here we go.
What color is my hair?
It's kind of...
Oh God, I'm so gonna lose this.
- [Plouffe] It stil-
- That doesn't look anything like me though.
- [David] It looks so much better than you!
- Yeah. It's very symmetrical.
I'm not very symmetrical.
- As far as I can tell,
there isn't any way to actually change
or adjust the hair shapes,
only what the presets are,
just kind of annoying.
(Linus snort laughs)
- 'Kay. Maybe we could change the pants to yeah,
that's more like, yeah.
Uh-huh.
'Kay. Definitely hoodie, okay.
Shoes.
There we go.
It's the closest we got
- [David] surprised you didn't
the choose the child for your body.
- The child
I'm not that short.
All right.
I need to find some mother(beep)
with a big nose, and I need to add that to my blend.
Show me the big old honking nose.
Why do these people all have perfect, adorable noses.
Look how cute this guy is.
Look at Jesse here.
Like man, 10 out of 10 doable.
- I think they're going to add a lot of stuff later on
because it does feel
like there's a lot of tweaks and details
that are missing currently.
- Yeah. I mean, one thing you can't really adjust is,
you know, eye separation,
and that's an even some fairly basic character creation
screens that I've seen.
We can move them apart and stuff.
Oh wow.
Okay.
- I'm gonna admit this doesn't look quite like you,
but I think that's just due to the limitations of the tool.
- Oh yeah, you're just gonna the blame the tool.
Well, when mine looks identical to me, you're gonna...
who's going to be laughing now.
(background chuckle)
Oh my God.
You can add more than three blend things.
I'm just gonna leave Christopher in there.
Okay, now we're just throwing stuff at the wall.
Okay, okay.
What about Pier?
Lets throw Pier in here.
Oh God. That's not it.
Pier get out
- [David] Matthias are you actually
using your keyboard hand?
- Yeah.
- What kind of shortcuts - [Linus] Wait, what?
- [David] Are you using? - [ Linus] What are you doing?
- Mostly just rotation and movements.
- I didn't even move the guy around at all.
Do you need to do that?
- [Matthias] If you want to a guy to get spelt
Of course you do.
(Linus sighs)
(background laugher)
- 'Cause if you could transition between two views
like you can actually see what you're doing.
- I think really this tool is designed
to make us feel bad about ourselves.
- [Plouffe] 30 seconds.
- 'Kay.
Okay. - Two, one.
- Okay. Count us down
- Three,
two,
one.
(dramatic music)
- [Both] Hmm
(background laughter)
- They fell Sims really.
- You definitely got the nose better.
I couldn't figure out the nose tool.
- So basically I didn't actually blend anything.
I just all did it manually.
- Really?
- Yes.
So the tools I primarily used were the move and sculpt,
then I just integrated parts
of the
features
to kind of give me a ballpark,
then tuned with the moving sculpt.
- Interesting. Yeah.
I definitely used blend
(clears throat)
- [Matthias] Which it took me a while to figure out
how to use.
And then I went in with moving sculpt
and then I made things worse.
For the most part,
I think the blend has a large potential to,
you know, to speed up all the workflow.
- [Linus] Uh-huh
- The problem is I didn't want to waste time
by learning a new tool
when I could just do it faster myself.
Right? If there's more hair customization
or if you could say sculpt the hair
like you can do the face,
- [Linus] Yeah.
- That would've made it so much better.
- I think with more time and experience,
I could get it closer,
but not a lot closer.
It needs way more tools with respect
to being able to like shape the face more.
Or maybe, I mean,
or actually, yours is better,
but it's hard to tell under the beard,
but I felt like I couldn't
draw in my cheeks enough. - Yeah.
I constantly tried to draw it in because
you have quit colored cheeks - My cheeks quiet concave
- [Both] Yeah.
And then the nose.
- Yes. - You can do anything
- Absolutely - with the nose
It needs way more in terms of accessories.
There's a lot of things about a person
that are identifiable markers
that you just can't put on.
Like I have a mole, for example,
that would really help go,
Oh yeah, that's Linus
or earrings or whatever.
- Which one looks more like Linus
- I don't know, they're both (chuckle) pretty bad.
(Linus and Matthias laugh)
- Ouch, ouch.
Stab don't twist.
(Matthias continues laughing)
So these are both supposed to be Linus?
- Mhmm (Linus and Matthias laugh)
- Ouch.
- Okay. - Supposed to
There's a bit of a,
I get a bit of an Asian vibe on this one here.
I don't immediately get Linus vibes from either of them
so there's that?
(Jonathan chuckles)
- Okay. What am I doing?
- [David] You need to decide
which face looks more like your husband.
- But neither of those
(Yvonne chuckles) Look like him
(Matthias laughs)
(Background laughter)
Honestly the one on the right kind of looks like
James to me.
But (Background laughter)
the one on the left,
the hair is just too nice-looking
like it's all swept so neatly,
and Linus' hair is always just
like he just woke up.
It's bedhead.(Yvonne chuckles)
- I didn't I think it was a good idea
to bring in someone who looks at me this much.
(Everyone laughs)
- Oh yeah.
And did you get the ears being offside a little bit?
(background laughter)
- I don't know.
The one on the left just looks more fake just in general,
it just looks less like a real human.
The one on the right.
I don't know, really, you know,
I just ,I can't get past the beard.
It's just too much.
It's just too much on the left.
I'm sorry.
I have experienced doing this
because I watched Linus do short surrogates all the time.
Both hairs, at least the hairstyles is off for sure.
Oh yeah.
The one on the right.
I liked the one on the right better.
So the right one
looks like what Linus
wants to look like - Oh, shut up!
(background scream laugher) And then the one on the left
is where I- (Jonathan chuckles)
- [David] Which one do you think looks more like Linus?
- Neither.
- I think I'm going to go with the one on the left,
just because this one looks too much like James to me
I'm gonna guess Matthias made that one.
- [David] No. Linus made that - Really?
- Yeah Lunis' self image is James
- They do look like people.
They just don't look like Linus.
Like maybe the one on the right
like maybe a slightly younger Linus,
but I've seen younger Linus
and he didn't look like that.
- And I'm gonna predict
I think Mathias did the one on the right.
- [David] You're very wrong!
- What? (laughs)
Oh, I'm so sorry Matthias.
- That's fine.
- You know, if I'm allowed to guess
who's done what.
- Don't look at us.
- Okay, fine.
I'm gonna guess that
the left one was done by Matthias,
and the right one was done by Linus.
- I'm gonna say that the left one was modeled by Linus.
The super beardy one,
just because
Linus is a jokester
and he would do that.
- I could see that being like the hero in your story.
And that's kind of like the,
Oh man, I don't know why Luke just popped
into my head.(Yvonne chuckles) - Go ahead
what were you (inaudible) for here huh?
(yvonne chuckles)
- Which one did you say it looked more like me again?
(background scream laugher)
So James is the hero in your story?
Is that what you're trying to say?
I'm gonna go down.
- I'm not a modern game development expert,
but I think it's pretty obvious
that this would help a lot in terms of
creating extremely diverse-looking
crowds of people.
I mean, we've seen so often where the main character
is like this
immaculately
crafted 3D model.
I think the
(finger snapping) reboot Tomb Raider games
are a great example
where Lara Craft is just like this
painstakingly
created model.
And then, pretty much everyone else in the games is like
yeah, it looks like it was done five years ago.
You know,
crowds of people with this level of diversity
with this amount of speed
is definitely gonna increase my immersion
because you see it so often
where you're like,
Oh yeah, that's the same one with a pallet swap.
Like it takes you out of it.
It's immersion-breaking.
Whereas this can improve that like overnight.
- I think it has a great potential to replace a large amount
of
NPC creation
in the scene where you need, say, a hundred
different characters,
all wandering around doing different things.
It's absolutely great
because it's rigged, textured
and ready to go and easily deployable,
you know.
Yeah. It's not great.
Admittedly
- Not great.
Unlike our sponsor Squarespace,
you might've heard of them.
They're a leader in website design,
and their all-in-one platform
makes it easy to make your own website.
In minutes, you can make any website
from a personal portfolio
to a resume
to fanfiction
or even shopping.
They've got website analytics tools.
That'll help you keep track of how your website's performing
and find all the weak areas
to make sure you get a steady stream of traffic.
And you can even buy a domain through them
as well as create email campaigns.
Man, they've got endless features.
And if you have any trouble
with any of their award-winning templates,
all you've got to do is reach out
to their customer support 24/7,
and they will help you out.
So head to squarespace.com/ltt for a free trial.
And when you're ready to launch,
you can get 10% off at our link down below.
Well, wasn't that fun.
I was actually, you know what?
We probably got closer than I expected.
If you guys are looking for another fun video to watch
we recently did one with two simultaneously running games
and people have to decide whether RTX is on or off.
The results will shock you.
That's me.
Thanks, Yvonne.