MetaHuman for Unreal Engine 5.6 continues to evolve the MetaHuman suite of products, offering new capabilities and features in various areas, including creation, animation, and styling.
In this latest version, MetaHuman Creator ships with Unreal Engine, allowing you to create MetaHuman characters with significantly improved visual fidelity and a completely new parametric body system. MetaHuman Animator is able to solve facial animation in real time from a much wider range of single-camera devices, while animation from audio adds head movement and creative control over the emotional state.
For the first time, MetaHumans and their compatible assets can be traded on Fab, allowing more creators to share their work and engage the marketplace.
MetaHuman for Maya and MetaHuman for Houdini provide capabilities to continue authoring MetaHumans on these platforms, whilst the EULA has been updated so that MetaHumans can be used in any engine.
MetaHuman Creator
In Unreal Engine 5.6, the MetaHuman Creator workflow moves into Unreal Engine, enabling you to create and author MetaHuman characters directly in the editor by using the new MetaHuman Character asset. A new parametric body system combined with an improved visual fidelity gives even greater flexibility to create the likeness you want. You can now use your own MetaHuman-compatible groom and clothing assets directly in MetaHuman Creator, meaning your characters can look better than ever before.
And, to show what’s possible with these new features, we’ve provided a new set of MetaHuman preset characters ready for you to use.
MetaHuman Animator
You can now solve animation in real time from a wide range of single-camera data sources (including webcams), mobile devices, or audio input. Integrated with Live Link, real-time animation can be used to preview a character in MetaHuman Creator, or animate a character placed in a level while editing.
Animation solved offline from audio-only input can now include plausible head motion, while also allowing you to influence the mood.
The new MetaHuman Animator Depth Processing plugin is required to solve animation from depth data (iOS or stereo camera pair) or use a MetaHuman Identity.
MetaHuman Capture
To support real-time animation in MetaHuman Animator, the Live Link Face (Beta) application is now available to download from the Google Play Store for Android devices with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (or later) chipset. The Live Link Face application on iOS (available on the App Store) has also been updated to generate animation in real time on the device.
Meanwhile, Live Link Hub is now used to ingest performance data for solving animation offline in MetaHuman Animator, simplifying virtual production and performance capture setups with streamlined data management, regardless of device.
MetaHumans on Fab
With this release, we’re establishing the MetaHuman channel on the Fab Marketplace, allowing you to buy and sell MetaHumans and MetaHuman-compatible grooms and clothing, made easy by a validation and packaging tool (MetaHuman Manager) provided in Unreal Engine.
The sale and purchase of MetaHumans on the Fab Marketplace are governed by the Unreal Engine EULA, Fab EULA and the Fab Distribution Agreement.
MetaHuman for Maya
A new plugin for Maya 2022-2025, MetaHuman for Maya provides four new tools for authoring and working with MetaHuman characters directly in Maya.
The Character Assembler tool loads MetaHuman Characters exported from MetaHuman Creator in Unreal Engine, ready for preview and animation.
The new Expression Editor tool enables you to fine tune the facial expressions of your characters, taking advantage of the same tools used to create many of our own MetaHuman characters. This can be used with Pose Editor to author the secondary deformations of the characters body using RBF (radial basis function) and SwingTwist solvers.
And lastly, a new Groom Exporter grants the easy export of XGen grooms as MetaHuman-compatible hairstyles for use with MetaHuman Creator in Unreal Engine.
The Groom Exporter is supported by a Groom Starter Kit available on Fab.
MetaHuman for Houdini
A new plugin for Houdini, MetaHuman for Houdini provides a collection of HDAs for assembling a MetaHuman character or creating MetaHuman-compatible grooms, ready for export and use with MetaHuman Creator in Unreal Engine.
MetaHuman for Houdini is compatible with Houdini 20.5 or later, however the HDAs used to assemble the character are only available when installed with Houdini 21.0 or later.
This plugin is supported by a Groom Starter Kit available on Fab.