Tag: unrealengine

unrealengine

Digital humans evolve

No commentApr 29th, 2021 in blendedreality, metaverse, unrealengine, vr by epredator

Way back in the dim and distant era of 2009 I was exploring a lot of tools to help me build virtual environments with avatars and characters that could be animated, typically in Unity. 3D modelling is an art in its right and then rigging those models for animation and applying animations to those is another set of skills too. At the time I was exploring Evolver, which in the end was bought by Autodesk in 2011. A decade on and there is a new kid on the block from Epic/Unreal called Metahuman. This cloud based application (where the user interface is also a cloud streamed one) runs in a browser and produces incredibly detailed digital humans. The animation rigging of the body is joined by very detailed facial feature rigging allow these to be controlled with full motion capture live in the development environment of Unreal. Having mainly used Unity there is a lot of similarity in the high level workflow experience of the two, as they are the leading approaches to assembling all sorts of game, film and XR content. However there was a bit of a leaning curve.

I decided to generate a couple of characters and ended up making what to me feels like Roisin and the Commander from my Reconfigure novels. Creating them in the tool plays instant animations and expressions on the faces and is really quite surreal an experience. I installed Unreal on my gaming rig with its RTX gfx card and all teh trimmings and set about seeing what I needed to do to get my characters working.

First there is an essential application called Quixel Bridge that would have been really handy a decade ago as it brokers the transfer of file formats between systems, despite standards being in place there are some quirks when you move complex 3D rigged assets around. Quixel can log directly into the metahuman repository and there is a specific plugin for the editor to import the assets to Unreal. Things in Unreal have a data and control structure called a blueprint that is a kind of configuration and flow model that can be used in a no-code (but still complex) way to get things working. You can still write c++ is needed of course.

My first few attempts to get Roisin to download failed as the beta was clearly very popular. I only took a photo of the screen not a screen cap, a bit low quality but there is more to come.

However, eventually I got a download and the asset was there and ready to go. Unreal has a demo application with two MetaHumans in it showing animation and lip synching and some nice camera work. Running this on my machine was a sudden rush to the future from my previous efforts with a decade old tech for things such as my virtual hospitals and the stuff on the TV slot I had back then.

Roisin from Reconfigure and Cont3xt in Unreal engine

The original demo video went like this

Dropping into the edits and after a lot of shader compilation I swapped Rosin with the first metahuman by matching the location coordinates and moving the original away. Then in the Sequence controller, the film events list I swapped the target actor from the original to mine and away we go.

This was recorded without the sound as I was just getting to grips with how to render a movie rather than play or compile an application to then screen cap instead. Short and sweet but proves it works. A very cool bit of tech.

I also ran the still image through the amusing AI face animation app Wombo.AI this animates stills rather than the above which is animating the actual 3d model. I am not posting that as they are short audio clips of songs and teh old DMCA takedown bots end to get annoyed at such things.

Now I have plan/pipe dream to see if I can animate some scenes from the books, if not make the whole damn movie/tv series 🙂 There are lots of assets to try and combine in this generation of power tooling. I also had a go at this tutorial, one of many that shows the use of a Live facial animation capture via an iPhone streamed to the metahuman model. I will spare Roisin public humiliation of sounded like me and instead leave it to the tutorial video for anyone wishing to try such a thing.

Lets see where this takes us all 🙂

Unreal Engine – an evolution

No commentMar 17th, 2015 in technical, unity3d by epredator

As you may have noticed I am a big fan of Unity3d. It has been the main go to tool for much of my development work over the years. A while back I had started to look at Unreal Engine too. It would be remiss of me to say Unity is the way I have always done things so I will stick with that 😉 My initial look at Unreal Engine though left me a little cold. This was a few years ago when it started to become a little more available. As a programmer, and with a background in C++ I was more than happy to take on the engineering challenge. However it was almost too much being thrown at me in one go. There was a great deal of focus on the graphics side of things. It felt, at the time, more like a visual designers tool with code hidden away. This was different from Unity3d that seemed to cross that workflow boundary offering either simple code, complicated graphics, or vice versa.
The new version of Unreal Engine, now fully free unless you make a lot of money building something with it, in which case you pay seems a much more friendly beast now. It has clearly taken onboard the way Unity3d does things. That initial experience and the packaging of various types of complexity allowing you to unwrap and get down to the things you know, but not get in the way on the things you don’t.
The launcher has access to the tool but also acts as a hub for other information and to the marketplace. I can’t remember this from the last time I looks at Unreal, but it is very obvious now.

The one document that leapt out is UE4 for Unity developers. This is addresses the differences and similarities between the two environments. Some of it is obviously a bit of “this is why we are better” and in some cases not strictly correct, particularly on object composition. However it is there and it does help. It recognises how huge Unity3d is rather the that slightly more arrogant stance that the toolset seemed to have as “we know best”. That is just a personal opinion and a feeling. That may seem odd for a software dev tool but when you work with these things you have a sense of who they are for and what they want to do. Unity3d has demo from humble beginnings as an indie tool grown to a AAA one. Unreal Engine, obviously had to start somewhere but was an in house toolkit that grew and grew making AAA titles then burst out into the world as a product. They both influence one another, but here it is the influence of Unity3d on Unreal Engine I am focussing on.
Also on this launcher are the quickstarts. Showing the roles of Artists, Level designer and programmer as different entry points. Another good point, talking the right language at the start.
Unity has a lot of sample projects and assets, some great tutorials. Unreal Engine now has this set of starter projects in a new project wizard. It is easy for more experience developers to sniff at these, but as a learning tool, or a prototyper being able to pick from these styles of project is very handy.

I had a number of “oh that’s how unreal works!” moments via these. First person, puzzle, 2d side scroller, twin stick shooter etc are all great. Unity3d does of course have 2D or 3D as a starting point for a project. Though I have always found 2D a bit strange in that environment, as I have build 2d in a 3d environment anyway.
The other interesting thing here is the idea of a C++ version or a Blueprint version. Blueprint is Unreal Engine providing a visual programming environment. Behavours and object composition is described through a programming facade. The blueprint can mix and match with C++ and shares some similarity with a Unity3d prefab, though it has more interactions described in visual composition than just exposing variable and functions/events in a prefab. Whilst blueprints may help people who don’t want to type c++. like many of the visual programming environments it is still really programming. You have to known what is changing, what is looping, what is branching etc. It is a nice feature and option and the fact it is not exclusively in that mode makes it usable.
Unreal Engine also seems to be happy to work on a Mac, despite much of the documentation mentioning Visual Studio and Windows it does play well with Xcode. It has to really to be able to target iOS platforms. So this was another plus in the experience.
The main development environment layout by default is similar to Unity3d too. All this helps anyone to have a look at both and see what works for them.

I am not a total convert yet. I still need to explore the multiplayer/server side of things. The ability to interface with other systems (which all my work ends up needing to do). Though I am not quite so turned off by it now. It seems a real contender in my field. So just like all these things you have to give it a go and see how it feels.