Yesterday's State of Unreal 2023 presentation was overshadowed by a surprise game announcement (opens in new tab), but Epic showed off some truly amazing technology coming to Unreal Engine 5 in the near future. These include impressive new procedural environment tools (open in new tab), character creation enhancements for Lords of the Fallen, realistic armor and clothing (open in new tab), and more. However, it was the MetaHuman Animator stage demo that caught my attention.

I have seen MetaHuman (opens in new tab) before, a tool that allows developers to generate fully rigged, highly realistic human faces for animation. However, actually animating those realistic faces to avoid the uncanny valley has been a difficult and time-consuming process. Motion capture, or having actors perform the movements and then animating the footage, has produced the best results, but requires specialized equipment and months of specialized work.

Now, so far. On stage, Epic showed off a new feature called MetaHuman Animator, designed to completely streamline this process. In a demo on stage (opens in new tab), actor and developer Melina Juergens, star of the "Hellblade" game, shoots a video of her own face with her iPhone, which a technician uploads, processes, and automatically You can see how it is converted.

The final video is not completely finished, and the animator would ideally go in and touch up elements and obviously incorporate them into the in-game scene, but it appears to be 90% complete, which is remarkable. You don't even have to map the person's face onto the modeled MetaHuman. You can use any face you have prepared, whether it is photo-realistic or stylized cartoon style.

The possibilities here are enormous. Not only will major studios be able to create facial animation in a fraction of the time, enabling increasingly realistic interactions in upcoming games, but smaller developers will be able to create morphing-quality scenes using only a cell phone and PC, rather than a 4D camera and a studio full of tiny white dots. alone will be able to create scenes of mocap quality.

Epic then released a development video of "Hellblade 2" using Ninja Theory's mo-cap equipment. It's a short video, but it's probably the most photorealistic game animation I've ever seen.

If developers are as excited about this as I am, prepare for a whole generation of games that are mostly characters telling Shakespearean monologues in extreme close-up; by 2030, you'll be familiar with every wrinkle and pore on the Doomguy's face. You will be.