Meet the MetaHumans

High-fidelity digital humans in minutes

Bringing compelling real-time digital humans to life is incredibly challenging and time-consuming. It can take months of research, costly scanning equipment, and an army of tech artists. What if we could make the process radically simpler, faster, and more scalable—without compromising on quality?

We’re excited to share a sneak peek at MetaHuman Creator, a new tool that will empower anyone to create a bespoke photorealistic digital human, fully rigged and complete with hair and clothing, in a matter of minutes.

Digital humans are the future

MetaHuman Creator sets a new benchmark for both the believability of digital humans, and also for the ease of creating them. You can directly manipulate facial features, adjust skin complexion, and select from preset body types, hairstyles, clothing, and more. You can even edit your character’s teeth!

Imagine game characters that will blow your players’ minds, digital doubles on the latest virtual production set that will stand up to close-up shots, virtual participants in immersive training scenarios you can’t tell from the real thing: the possibilities for creators are limitless.

A sneak peek at MetaHuman Creator

MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed app that takes real-time digital human creation from weeks or even months to less than an hour—at an unprecedented standard of quality, fidelity, and realism. When your character is finished, you can export and download it, rigged and ready to animate in Unreal Engine.

Free MetaHumans sample

These two high-quality, fully rigged sample characters represent the current state of the art for real-time digital humans and serve as a showcase of what’s achievable with MetaHuman Creator. They’re yours to explore, modify, and use in your Unreal Engine 4.26.1 or later projects.

get the sample project

Powered by advanced technology

Over the last several years, we’ve seen real-time digital humans of increasingly realistic quality running in Unreal Engine. These include fictional characters like Senua and Siren, and digital doubles of Andy Serkis and Mike Seymour.

3Lateral and Cubic Motion have led the field in creating performance capture-driven 4D animation; we’re proud that both of those companies are now part of the Epic Games family. Together with the Unreal Engine team, they’re working on bringing cutting-edge character research to MetaHuman Creator.

SENUA’S SAGA: HELLBLADE II, courtesy of Ninja Theory | Xbox Game Studios

‘Hellblade’ character Senua gets a next-gen makeover

At GDC 2016, Epic partnered with 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, IKinema, and Xsens to demonstrate a live performance of Ninja Theory’s Senua character from their game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. In 2019, Ninja Theory revealed the trailer for the upcoming Xbox Series X release of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, taking the character to a new level of believability.

see the trailer

Siren delivers a convincing real-time performance

In 2018, we joined forces with 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Tencent, and Vicon to raise the bar for live-captured digital humans using Unreal Engine. Meet Siren, a high-fidelity, real-time digital character based on the likeness of Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang.

watch the video

Image courtesy of Tencent and Epic Games, Inc.

Image courtesy of 3Lateral

Digital Andy Serkis does Shakespeare

Revealed at GDC 2018, a digital version of Andy Serkis reciting lines from Macbeth was a breakthrough in real-time human-driven digital characters. The performance was brought to life by a combination of Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering and 3Lateral’s MetaHuman Framework volumetric capture, reconstruction, and compression technology.

find out more

fxguide’s Mike Seymour sets out to create his digital double

At SIGGRAPH 2017, fxguide Co-Founder and researcher Mike Seymour, together with a broad team of graphics researchers, universities, and technology providers, showcased MEETMIKE, a real-time performance-captured VR version of himself, rendered at 90 FPS in stereo in Unreal Engine.