Hi,
I have recently learned about some pretty realistic 3D models named MetaHumans. I was able to get it working in Unreal Engine but I dislike using UE. Does anyone know if there’s a process to bring them into Unity?
Thanks.
I think it was attempted with mixed results. These are ultimately just very good models, so if you can get them into Blender, you can get them anywhere.
I am unfamiliar with the licensing rules for metahuman, so please make sure you don’t anger our friends over at epic - see if you’re allowed first.
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You most probably can’t use them any commercial projects tho. They’re Unreal exclusive like other Megascan and free Epic assets.
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Well, no.
They appear to be licensed as “Unreal Engine” only.
At the moment Epic Marketplace insists on loading in japanese for me, so I’m unsure if something changed since.
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Fair.
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And before “that’s just for the sample content”:
At the moment, MetaHuman Creator - Unreal Engine says:
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Disregarding the rights issues - they are nice models but they are designed for rendering, animationg, and operating in unreal. You can get the source files but the work you’d need to do to properly render them in unity wouldnt be a plug and play thing.
You’d need custom shaders or to rework the textures to conform to an existing shader. And the skeleton… I dont really know but I imagine you’d have to go to some lengths to get conformity there.
Much of what makes cahracters look great is the eyes. There is a lot of fancy tech going on to make those eyes look so realistic. And if you dont get it 100% of the way there, the model will look 100% different. It may still be “fine” but its not gonig to be special.
In short, if you are thinking it’s a plug and play thing, forget it. It would be significant time investment to build a pipeline to use these character in an engine they aren’t built around.
I think you could probably still boost workflow speed by using the source files as a base to build new characters from. That’s probably questionable and not something you advertise but if the final result is different topo, different uv’s, and rendered with different techniques, I doubt anybody could know.
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MakeHuman will allow you to create character actors so to speak ready for Unity…or Zbrush-> Unity if you want the sculpting details. The large nosed bony cheeked old tramp. The mega rock-jawed drill sergeant caricature. The short chubby oriental cook. MetaHuman produces uniformly bland, metrosexual vibed, psuedo-handsome characters only.
I certainly do not see the world so blandly. Try to make in MetaHuman without a round trip to Maya such archetypal humans as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Phyllis Diller, Rodney Dangerfield, Marty Feldman…all mega-iconic because they do not conform to some bland edict of beauty or handsomeness. I can do it or get darned close in MakeHuman.
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That would make the most epic rpg ever!
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I think it’s possible to do something similar using Daz Studio products and Daz prices (including commercial use in game engines) seem pretty good to me.
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Frankly, I’m not that impressed with the metahuman stuff. They fall right into the uncanny valley. Seeing the recent Matrix Unreal console demo, the characters looked way off, especially in contrast with how great the city looked.
vs
I watched the video of the demo recently. The characters looked decent, or rather great, from distance. There were however issues up close. For example, I recall a car driving through a pedestrian with no effect (phased through), and a classic car glitch where a player bumps into npc car, but in doing so ends up sliding UNDER npc car and flips it over.
I’m not entirely sure if those were done with metahumans, to be honest.
Yeah, fair point, I assumed they are Metahuman based, but there is no explicit mention of it.
Maybe they are bad on purpose to match the 3d in Matrix Reloaded 
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The biggest thing that broke the immersion for me was animations, the animations are not up to speed, they looked stiff. Also I’d be more soft pointing out glitches like cars going through ground or through themselfs ;), it was a demo probably cooked in couple of months so no big time to polish.
More concernig for me are those animations, night mode that didnt look very good with lumen, strange artifacts on distance buildings like this temporal solution was not keeping up or whatnot. 
Other than that it looked amazing.
Gamers don’t care about that stuff. If you do the big things well the little things dont matter.
Too much perfectionism will keep designers from finishing work. This demo represents a massive leap in visual quality for console games. It showcases some of the best-in-class work by seasoned professionals. I’ve read that epic may be releasing the project to public in the future. Anybody interested in boosting performance of their games will have another great example project to learn from.
I agree in general that realistic human characters are at a point that they look a bit creepy because they are like 95% realistic but still show CG signs, but the incessant goal of every artist is to recreate real life it seems, so this is one step closer towards that. It they waited until the animations were absolutely perfect and couldnt be identified as CG, the project would never be released.
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One part that really stood out for me was where a car took a turn, but the gunner on its roof was completely unaffected by inertia. Instantly noticeable.
I have a good number of non-developer friends I regularly play games with, and while they don’t focus on these issues for long they do mock them and we will occasionally share videos of it happening.
Exactly. Bethesda plant, anyone?
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sure but what people talk about isn’t an indication of how they spend their money.
case in point, following post. The biggest, most successful mainstream RPGs, and everybody is laughing about plants through the walls.
It clearly doesn’t matter and it’s not something should be concerned about. Not unless the BIG parts of your game are in good order, anyway.
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They do matter very much.
You know, when you play GTA 5 and see character walk in flip flops and see those flip flops actually flip flop, that contributes to the high fidelity feeling. Or when you notice that wrinkles on a back of a suit change pattern when character runs.
You need to do this sort of thing if you are chasing high fidelity, and that’s why I prefer low poly. So I won’t be rigging flipflops.
They’re neither biggest nor the most successful.
The most successful is Pokemon Red, Green and Blue, released in 1996.
Witcher 3 is larger than skyrim, and the witcher devs also had phenomenal attention to detail. I recall watching npc cats in Witcher 2. Realized that they have an AI, a cat would wander around, groom itself, plop on the floor and purr. Those small things leave strong impact when you notice them. That’s why they’re implemented in the first place.
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