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Epic shows off Unreal’s nearly real ‘MetaHuman’ 3D character creator
One of the most difficult tasks in the increasingly high-fidelity world of gaming is making realistic-looking people — especially faces. Epic today showed off a new character creation tool in Unreal Engine that lets you make a near-infinite variety of near-photorealistic digital people with far less effort than it might have taken before.
MetaHuman Creator is an application for designing characters that lets people mix and match presets then dive into the tiniest details. It’s a cloud-hosted service, since the amount of computing power and storage needed to render these characters at this resolution and level of lighting and so on is more than most people will have on hand.
Anyone who’s used a high-quality character creator will recognize the pieces — a few dozen hairstyles, ear types, beards and lip shapes, which can be added, subtracted and adjusted like a digital Mr. Potato Head. Bet you didn’t see that reference coming!
Image Credits: Epic
The difference between MetaHuman and, say, a state of the art consumer-level creator like Cyberpunk 2077’s is fidelity and flexibility. As you can see in the videos, the quality of the hair, skin, eyes, teeth and so on is extremely high — the older fellow on the left has quite realistic wrinkles that shadow and deform properly when he moves his face, and the way the light interacts with the center lady’s light skin is very different from that of the dark-skinned man on the right.
The “center lady” also started as a middle-aged man and was sculpted piece by piece to her current look rather than just switching to a “feminine” preset, demonstrating that the faces don’t “break” if you manipulate them too much — a risk in other creators for sure. You can see the process in fast-forward in the video below:
Naturally it also integrates with the usual creator tools, allowing for animation by various means, fiddling with meshes and exporting for use in other tools.
This level of detail isn’t exactly unprecedented, but the amount of work that goes into rendering a main character good enough for extreme close-ups and microexpressions is huge. Epic’s approach is not just to increase the potential quality of the assets and lighting and so on but to make it easy and efficient to implement. If only AAA studios can muster the resources to make characters like this, it’s not healthy for gaming as a whole.
Epic was humble enough to give credit right off the bat to companies like 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, both specialists in the field it has acquired. The Unreal Engine is presented as a sort of monolithic advance in computer graphics and design, but really it’s a very cleverly assembled amalgamation of dozens of improvements and advances made by individual (now acquired) companies and divisions over the years — more like an operating system with a bunch of integrated applications at this point.
MetaHuman Creator isn’t quite ready for use by just anyone, but Epic is running an early-access program you can sign up for, and they’ve provided a pair of models for you to play with in your existing Unreal Engine environment in the meantime (check the “Learn” tab).
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Epic acquires Rad Game Tools, veteran of many gaming generations
Epic today announced the acquisition of Rad Game Tools, maker of game development tools for many years. They’ve stayed largely behind the scenes, but many gamers will recognize the colorful Bink Video logo, which has appeared in the openings of many a title over the years.
“Our work with Epic goes back decades, and joining forces is a natural next step given our alignment on products, mission, and culture,” Rad Game Tools founder and CEO Jeff Roberts said in the announcement. And it has seemingly only intensified recently.
Close integration with engines and platforms makes for good standards, and good standards get embraced by developers. That’s why Epic has been cozying up to Sony as well as snapping up components to fit into its Unreal engine, positioning it as an all-encompassing development platform for next-generation games.
Image Credits: RAD Game Tools
Rad (styled RAD) has been in games for a long time, as its decidedly old-school website attests. Bink is a video codec for games that focuses on high compression and speedy rendering, both important in the gaming world. Oodle, Telemetry, Granny 3D and Miles Sound System are all development tools beyond what the lay person would understand, but no doubt have many fans.
Epic may be known now as the creator of money-printing machine Fortnite, but the company has been around for decades and probably knows the Rad team well. That may help explain the friendly terms under which the acquisition will take place.
“RAD will continue supporting their game industry, film, and television partners, with their sales and business development team maintaining and selling licenses for their products to companies across industries – including those that do not utilize Unreal Engine,” Epic said in its announcement.
So while Bink and the rest will continue to be available for anyone to use outside Epic’s domain, they will almost certainly be better integrated with the Unreal ecosystem. As game development cost and complexity rises, means of simplification are often taken advantage of. Epic is working hard to make Unreal not just the most graphically powerful engine for development, but also the most unified.
A request for comment and further details on the deal sent to Rad Game Tools was intercepted by Epic and declined.
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Unity’s IPO numbers look pretty … unreal?
Unity, the company founded in a Copenhagen apartment in 2004, is poised for an initial public offering with numbers that look pretty strong.
Even as its main competitor, Epic Games, is in the throes of a very public fight with Apple over the fees the computer giant charges developers who sell applications (including games) on its platform (which has seen Epic’s games get the boot from the App Store), Unity has plowed ahead, narrowing its losses and maintaining its hold on over half of the game development market.
For the first six months of 2020, the company lost $54.2 million on $351.3 million in revenue. The company narrowed its losses compared to 2019, when the company lost $163.2 million on $541.8 million in revenue, and 2018 when the company lost $131.6 million on $380.8 million in revenue. As of June 30, 2020 the company had total assets of $1.29 billion and $453.2 million in cash.
Increasing revenue and narrowing losses are things that investors like to see in companies that they’re potentially going to invest in, as they point to a path to profitability. Another sign of the company’s success is the number of customers that contribute more than $100,000 in annual revenue. In the first six month of the year, Unity had 716 such customers, pointing to the health of its platform.
The company will trade on the NYSE under the single-letter ticker “U”. The NYSE only has a few single letters left to offer, although Pandora gave up the letter P when it was bought by Liberty Media back in 2018.
Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers and gamers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53% of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50% of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.
Some of the top titles that the platform claims include Nintendo’s Mario Kart: Tour, Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp; Niantic’s Pokémon GO and Activision’s recent Call of Duty: Mobile are also Unity games.
The knock against Unity is that it’s not as powerful as Epic’s Unreal rendering engine, but that hasn’t stopped the company from making forays into industries beyond gaming — something that it will need to continue doing if it’s to be successful.
Unity already has a toehold in Hollywood, where it was used to recreate the jungle environment used in Disney’s “Lion King” remake (meanwhile, much of “The Mandalorian” was created using Epic’s Unreal engine).
Of course, Unity’s numbers also reveal that the size of its business is currently a bit smaller than its biggest rival. In 2019, Epic said it had earnings of $730 million on revenue of $4.2 billion, according to VentureBeat . And the North Carolina-based game developer is now worth $17.3 billion.
Still, the games market is likely big enough for both companies to thrive. “Historically there has been substantial industry convergence in the games developer tools business, but over the past decade the number of developers has increased so much, I believe the market can support two major players,” Piers Harding-Rolls, games analyst at Ampere Analysis, told the Financial Times.
Venture investors in the Unity platform have waited a long time for this moment, and they’re certainly confident in the company’s prospects.
The last investment round valued the company at $6 billion, with the secondary sale of $525 million worth of the company’s shares.
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Epic Games announces Unreal Engine 5, shows off boundary-pushing PlayStation 5 demo
After eight years of Unreal Engine 4, Epic Games is finally ready to talk about Unreal Engine 5, which they’re announcing will launch in preview early next year with a wider launch by the year’s end.
Unreal Engine 5 is all about harnessing the performance of next-generation consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The consoles support wild resolutions and frame rates, but Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was most excited about how the new hardware handles data storage, something he says will lead to “state of the art performance” better than any gaming PC.
For Unreal Engine 5, the big evolution appears to be dynamic rendering, allowing developers to drop massively complex objects with millions of polygons into their games and lean on the engine to determine how intricately the object can be rendered onscreen. In the case of the PlayStation 5, that’s pretty damn intricate. Epic Games showcased the new engine running on the PS5 in a truly stunning demo.
“We’re turning scalability from a developer’s problem into our problem,” Sweeney says.
Sweeney says the demo is the representation of what happens when the polygons being rendered shrink to the size of individual pixels. “This is all the detail that you can get until you get a higher-resolution monitor, or until 8K or 16K come along,” he says.
Unreal Engine 5’s major advances are centered around a pair of new products called Nanite and Lumen. Nanite deals with said dynamic rendering product allowing for massively detailed scenery, while Lumen is a new pipeline for dynamic scene illumination, allowing for more life-like lighting of digital assets.
The new update will also push connectivity further, bringing Epic Online Services into the fold with toolsets that can help developers make their online gameplay leverage multiple platforms, connecting mobile, console and PC, just as Fortnite has.
Alongside news of the big update’s release, Epic Games has shared that Fortnite, which will unsurprisingly be leveraging Unreal Engine 5, will be a launch title on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. While the game’s cartoonish art style won’t be pushing boundaries quite as much as hyperrealistic titles like the one above, adding the next-gen consoles means more platforms on which to reign supreme.
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Unreal Engine 4 support is coming to HoloLens 2
Microsoft closed out today’s big HoloLens 2 debut with a surprise appearance by Epic Games CEO, Tim Sweeney. The gaming exec was clearly impressed by the technology’s future for both developement and consumer augmented reality.
“I believe that AR is going to be the primary platform of the future for both work and entertainment,” he told the crowd at the event.
The Fortnite creator is kicking things off on the development side, announcing that Unreal Engine 4 support will be coming to the headset. The move is part of a larger strategy for Microsoft to open the system up, as it looks to grow its key foray into the world of mixed reality.
For Epic, meanwhile, it’s part of a larger embrace of both Microsoft’s solution and all things AR. Sweeney noted that the company is not ready to announce any kind of consumer-facing AR offering, that they’re certainly on the way, and the company “will support HoloLens in all of our endeavors.”
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PlayFab Raises $2.5M For Its Gaming Backend Service
Nowadays, most studios building games for mobile, PC, or consoles are actually building services: there are servers where gamers play together, leaderboards, in-app purchases to process, inventories to manage, character stats to keep track of, and more. While extremely helpful, most game engines don’t help you implement this side of things Read More
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