Unreal's MetaHuman Animator can generate surprisingly lifelike animation with just your phone and it's now integrated directly into Unreal Engine 5.6

The The Witcher 4, and while I was picking my jaw up from the floor, something new found its way onto my screen—a bizarre animated alien rendered from a webcam feed in real time.

Epic's new updates to MetaHuman, its suite of lifelike digital human character tools, are astoundingly cool, and feel like they may help lower the barrier to entry for budding developers.

Effectively, the entire suite is intended for use by developers to make character models with high levels of detail more easily, which can then be exported for use in projects.

With the launch of Unreal Engine 5.6, it has been integrated directly into the engine to optimize workflow. There are a few main elements of MetaHuman getting updates.

MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-enhanced bit of software for building hyper-realistic models. This is now getting a body component, for further customization, but Epic Games has also announced the ability to get its source code, which should give s more of an ability to customize it.

The new body system also comes with the ability to add clothes, which will dynamically wrap around models. This effectively means you don't have to create new clothes for new body types, and clothes packages can be bought and sold on a separate marketplace.

These are all interesting additions to a very impressive tool, but it's the MetaHuman Animator that really wowed me (that's the one with the alien I was talking about). Effectively, it can take footage from a webcam or phone, and plant it onto a MetaHuman, and it's all done in real-time.

Actors don't even have to wear custom suits, as is traditionally donned in motion capture, and it can be done on mono capture devices (a video source without depth, like what you might find in a head mounter camera).

Above: Unreal Engine 5 MetaHuman Animate Tool shown off in real-time. Credit: Epic Games.

The presentation of this tool has a 'reality cam' so that it can show the difference between real capture and that of the animation. There's almost no lag in between the two clips, and facial expressions are captured with ease. The actor moves their mouth to their left, and the alien's mouth texture stretches in a similar fashion.

Perhaps most impressively, MetaHuman Animator can be used with an audio source and character model alone, and can "take into the emotion of the speaker from the audio to provide more lifelike animation".

You can adjust the emotionality of animation, and it will even add head movement to your character to seem more realistic.

This tech feels like it could be a major boon to developers, and the fact that it's both built into Unreal Engine 5.6 and creators are encouraged to use the Fab asset store feels like an excellent way for smaller teams to get their hands on expressive and real-feeling digital characters.

Digital characters made with MetaHuman can also be used in other engines, too.

I can't believe I'm saying this as someone who isn't a developer, but this has made me genuinely excited for a tool in a game engine.

Time will only tell how well this works for development teams, but the full launch should encourage them to go hands-on with it.