Generate full-character animation for your MetaHuman directly in Unreal Engine (UE) from standard video footage, like a webcam.
The same MetaHuman Animator workflow that drives facial performance capture now handles body capture too. With the MetaHuman Animator Markerless Motion Capture plugin, you can capture body, or both body and face performance from a single camera.
The plugin removes the requirement for a mocap rig, helmet camera, or markers for motion capture. No separate pipeline is needed to stitch results together. The video-to-mocap pipeline includes the batch process of the footage locally on your machine for high-fidelity results.
To capture face animation in real time, see Realtime Animation.
MetaHuman Animator Markerless Motion Capture plugin is an experimental feature introduced in Unreal Engine 5.8. Experimental features are not production-ready and may change or be removed in future releases. The plugin is available only on Windows for body or face and body capture.
Prerequisites
Before you begin, make sure you have the following:
Unreal Engine 5.8 or later installed.
MetaHuman Animator plugin enabled from UE.
MetaHuman Animator Markerless Motion Capture plugin installed and enabled from Fab.
A fundamental understanding of performance captures best practices. To learn more, see Performance Capture Guidelines.
One or more performance takes, captured using a single video camera or the Live Link Face iOS application configured to use a non-TrueDepth camera.
For supported hardware, see MetaHuman Animator Hardware Requirements.
Workflow Overview
The MetaHuman Animator workflow includes creating animation from performance capture for face, body, or both. The workflow produces standard animation sequences and works just like other animation.
Two capture paths are available:
Single Camera: Face and body solves run independently on the same footage. Use this when capturing from a single camera.
Dual Camera: Face and body are captured with separate cameras and combined in a level sequence. Use this when footage was recorded with separate rigs (for example, a helmet-mounted camera for face and an off-actor reference camera for body), or when the final game character does not yet exist. For characters still in production, you can solve against an identity stand-in MetaHuman first. Since all MetaHumans share the same skeleton, the animation maps to the final character without retargeting.
Generating full-character animation from video consists of the following steps:
Ingest Your Footage: Import your video through Capture Manager in Live Link Hub to create a capture data asset in your project.
Process and Export Your Animation: Configure the solve settings in the MetaHuman Performance editor, run the solve, and export the result as an animation sequence.
Preview Your Animation: Assign the exported animation to your MetaHuman in a level sequence.
Get Started
Use the following pages to go through the primary workflow for creating face and body animation from a video capture.
1. Import Your Footage
Learn to import your video footage into Unreal Engine as a capture data asset using Live Link Hub.
2. Process and Export Your Animation
Learn to configure the MetaHuman performance asset to solve face animation, body animation, or both, then export the result as an animation sequence.
3. Apply Your Animation to a MetaHuman
Learn to assign your exported animation sequence to a MetaHuman character using a level sequence.
