What are MetaHumans?

MetaHumans are very complex characters that have the capability of looking photorealistic and moving realistically. They are templates to be edited by users and artists. The editing of the character templates takes place on a web browser and allows the user to see their character design being displayed in extreme realism.

A lot of the development of MetaHuman Creator is around real-time rendering. Typically, the shading of skin for CGI characters involves a substantial amount of CPU processing, particularly for high-detail areas, such as subtle reflections, pores, and tiny hairs or fuzz. The MetaHuman skin shaders are designed to work in real time within Unreal Engine by harnessing recent technological hardware advances, such as real-time ray-tracing in NVIDIA RTX cards.

In addition to photorealistic skin shaders, MetaHumans have a network of bones and blend shapes that allow for incredibly intricate and powerful facial puppeteering, as well as the ability to be combined with facial and body motion capture, all in real time within Unreal.

Now that you have a good understanding of Unreal Engine and MetaHumans, we will get the software up and running on your system so you can start using Unreal in the next chapter.