But it's not currently suited for studios with needs outside this spectrum. Scale is the key way to think about what MetaHuman Creator offers developers: it can generate lots of very high-quality realistic human models very quickly. "Each project has brought us closer to a systematic way of producing digital humans at scale," Mastilovic says. Then, in 2018, Epic presented Siren: The Digital Human and actor Andy Serkis performing lines from Macbeth with an alien face, both also based on realtime performance capture. First there was Meet Mike, presented at the 2017 SIGGRAPH conference by Epic, 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, in which visual-effects writer Mike Seymour conducted realtime 3D-scanned interviews with various industry leaders which viewers could watch in VR. In fact, MetaHuman Creator's development has been progressing quietly in plain sight. Both of these companies contributed heavily to the performance capture and animation in Ninja Theory's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, which was released in 2016 and runs in Unreal Engine 4. And in March 2020 it bought Cubic Motion, a Manchester-based company specialising in facial animation. In 2019, it bought 3Lateral, a specialist in body and face scanning and motion capture which was founded by Mastilovic in Novi Sad in Serbia. MetaHuman is the culmination of various acquisitions and developments at Epic over the past few years. "It starts with our custom-built scanners and then goes through different teams that manage data preparation, fitting, clean-up, shapes modelling, rigging, texturing, look dev and database integration with the tool." Unsurprisingly, part of the project's ongoing development is not only to expand the library but also to automate the process. "It's a carefully supervised process, from the first scans down to last QA checks of the health of the database," Mastilovic says.
The database is the product of painstaking scanning of real humans. "Up until now it has taken very sophisticated teams weeks or months to create just one high-quality digital human" Vladimir Mastilovic, Epic Games