The MetaHuman plugin for UE has been released in beta in late 2022. While at first I did not give it much attention, the release of it's "mesh to human" feature immediately caught my eye. I decided to give it a shot!
For the purpose of this test I decided to use my smartphone's front-facing camera, to prove that no specialist gear is required to make it work.
There are three main software components to the process. The process, high-level, looks as such:
If you'd like to try it yourself, Unreal Engine offers an in-depth tutorial on the process here:
The quality of the result was surprising, even to me. Once the metahuman is created, it's easily usable within UE5.
This feature will allow anyone to have a realistic, 3D avatar of themselves with just a few clicks and a range of free-to-use software. I can imagine, in the future, this process will become even more streamlined, with software doing all the processing for you.
