Epic Games brings MetaHumans to Unreal Engine 5

Epic Games has added a new MetaHuman plugin for Unreal Engine, which allows users to refine custom MetaHumans or create new ones from scratch for photorealistic digital humans.

Currently in early accesss, the first major feature is Mesh To MetaHuman, which allows users to to take their own custom facial mesh, created using scanning, sculpting, or traditional modeling tools, and convert it into a MetaHuman, fully rigged and ready to animate. They can also further refine their characters in MetaHuman Creator. 

MetaHuman Creator has a number of new features, including ten new facial animation loops, six new body poses, more clothing options, 13 new hair styles, and 10 new styles of styles of beards, mustaches, eyebrows, and eyelashes. There are also further colour customisation options.

All of Unreal Engine 5’s new character rigging and animation features can then be used with the MetaHumans. These include: Control Rig, which allows users to create rigs and share them across multiple characters; Sequencer, where users can animate their characters, and save and apply poses with the new Pose Tool; IK Retargeter, which allows users to transfer animations between all MetaHumans and other characters; IK Rig, which allows users to interactively create solvers and goals that perform pose editing for their skeletal meshes; and more.

In addition, with Chaos as the default physics engin in Unreal Engine 5, all MetaHumans now have active ragdoll physics - with features such as trying to protect their heads when falling. Also, Quixel Bridge can be used to upload MetaHumans to UE5 projects.