With MetaHuman Creator, Epic Games have crossed the line from good to evil, and Unreal Engine is now a tool for unseen levels of chaos.
MetaHuman Creator is wizardry. Give a damn what they say about tech, we have officially reached the ‘fuck no’ point in technology. A method of rapidly developing photorealistic faces is here, and it’s kind of haunting.
Watch the freakish faces belie their artificial ancestry in the promo video below, and round up the villagers, because I’m ready to grab my torch and pitchfork to storm the castle.
Sensationalist fear aside, this tech is incredible and ridiculous. If you hadn’t noticed by now, I’m not a code genius, so I’ll let Unreal speak for themselves here:
“MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed app designed to take real-time digital human creation from weeks or months to less than an hour, without compromising on quality. It works by drawing from an ever-growing library of variants of human appearance and motion, and enabling you to create convincing new characters”
Which, as far as I can tell, means that the app allows you to mix and match from previously created ultra-high quality photorealistic models in a way that’s never been seen before. This makes me think it’s a bit like a digital version of the website This Person Does Not Exist, which is also a trip to dabble in.
Steal from one person, you’re a thief, steal from everyone and you’re a genius seems to be the ethos here. As long as the faces you make are composites of multiple others, then the output will be a truly unique creation.
Personally, I’m amazed by how realistic the eyes in the video are. If eyes are the window into the soul, than the MetaHumans definitely have souls, which is good to know, because I’ll see them in hell.
