So, after spending a few weeks learning about taking human characters from DAZ into Maya, and spending much of that time working on getting them to look at least somewhat realistic, what does Epic do but go and give me early access to their Metahuman Creator project. And basically makes all that work seem like a toddler eating Play-Doh.
Good grief.
Look at what I made in less then 5 minutes.
This is a character created by Epic's web-based Meta Human Creator, as seen on their web tool.
And here it is in running on my system in the UE4 default 3rd person project. Yes, that's in real time.
Of course, as I mentioned, this is early access. So it is kind of limited in the kinds of things you can do, and the focus is very obviously on the face/head for now with almost no ability to adjust anything else. And the character, as it comes into UE4 now, is NOT production ready. But no one should expect an early access tool to be production ready right?
One neat thing I was able to do was link their Live Link Face app on my iphone to the character and have it basically matching my movements, expression, and even blinks. Again, there were lots of quirks and limitations, but man. I am really looking forward to seeing how this tool evolves. Talk about a game changer for the democratization of creating real time photoreal characters.