[HN Gopher] A sneak peek at MetaHuman Creator
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A sneak peek at MetaHuman Creator
Author : jsheard
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-02-10 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unrealengine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unrealengine.com)
| witherk wrote:
| Impressive. There is a cartoonlike quality. I wonder if that is
| there to keep the models from looking creepy or if they just
| wanted their models to look cartoony.
| Igelau wrote:
| This is an awkward thing to demo because it has look good, but
| it also has to look "good". I didn't think the second video
| with the black woman and the asian man was very impressive.
| They look airbrushed, which makes sense because you don't want
| to say "hey, look at how believable these ugly craggy people
| are", but on the other hand I think it plays it too safe by not
| showing off what they can do.
|
| Of course, that's not really the point. The point is that the
| metahuman creator tool apparently makes it very fast-and-easy-
| ish to create "metahuman" characters that look a notch or two
| better than the Final Fantasy movie from 20 years ago.
|
| The older faces that they made in the video that demoed the
| tool itself, rather than the result, were pretty impressive.
| uses wrote:
| Things are going to get really weird in the next decade or two.
| Right now AI is able to "communicate" with us mostly via text,
| and indirectly via algorithms.
|
| With human-like agents that have human-like voices, appearances,
| and mannerisms, they'll be able to communicate with millions of
| average Joes, and all in a way particular to that specific Joe.
| AI being able to do infinite amounts of "ambient work" and expose
| us to the results via human-like entities makes for a very
| different world of possibilities.
|
| And right now the big AIs that most people directly interface
| with are clumsy and abstract, but they're also tied in the
| backend to large pools of closed data owned by mostly well-
| meaning entities. But how will things change when and if the AI
| Joe interacts with isn't directed and contained by wealthy US-
| based corporations?
| ianbicking wrote:
| I'm really confused about what we (as humans) really want.
| Here's this incredible technology to make human features, and
| video games already have excellent technology, yet the entities
| in video games don't _act_ like humans. It's like an incredible
| holographic cardboard cutout. The characters don't act like
| aliens either! They are just backdrops with scripted cut
| scenes.
|
| I don't feel like this is an accident. But I don't know what to
| think of it, I'm still a bit confused about what we're really
| trying to get out of these facsimiles.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| What we (as humans) want is safety and company.
|
| What are we going to get out of it?
|
| An ad inside your game that is a male/female/whatever of your
| preferred attributes selling you things with a seductive
| voice. Or a company selling that avatar to you as a in-game
| companion/skin. Or propagating services through that avatar.
|
| Looking here, it fits into TenCent masterplan. Sell an
| avatar/avatars to users as companions. Add it to snapchat -
| see it in AR!. Let it read a spotify audibook to you! Buy it
| clothes and skins, play with it in Fortnite or Roblox!
| Imagine all the possibilities of upselling, crosselling and
| overselling virtually generated items (your only cost is data
| and electricity - potential unlimited) for virtual characters
| that people will start to feel emotional ties to since
| they'll grow up surrounded with them or to fill an emotional
| void left by lack of socialisation.
| olooney wrote:
| Chloe, the digital avatar on the menu of the video game
| _Detroit: Becoming Human_ is sort of a sneak peak into what
| that might be like. (Potential spoilers! Chloe has her own
| story line, and if you want to experience that, don 't watch
| the whole video.)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTUhKs_xwQ
| jimsmart wrote:
| You might be interested in the work of Soul Machines [0]
| (online demo on website), a company formed by Mark Sagar
| [1][2]. There are a few interesting talks by him if you search
| on Youtube.
|
| Their AI-driven avatars are already in use in a handful of
| places, and fairly well received.
|
| "The future is already here - it's just not evenly
| distributed."
|
| -- Appearance-wise, I think MetaHuman's stuff looks better than
| Soul Machines' -- but SM's avatars are backed with a
| conversational AI, and are not available as a UE-plugin. So
| it's not an apples-for-apples comparison of course.
|
| [0] https://www.soulmachines.com
|
| [1] https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/engineering/community-
| engageme...
|
| [2] https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-
| artif...
| mmastrac wrote:
| Still in the uncanny valley, but it feels like we're climbing out
| of it slowly.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Having seen only the two videos on the article's page, I
| actually thought they'd passed the valley. To me, they
| successfully looked artificial (though there were moments where
| they could have been real) but almost never creepy.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Yea, those teeth are a bit gnarly. But I'm sure they'll nail it
| down real quick.
| 1shooner wrote:
| I would be interested to hear from an animator what makes
| teeth so challenging.
| Igelau wrote:
| It's probably an 80:20 problem of sorts. More like a 99:1.
| Externally, people mostly appear to be comprised of flesh
| and hair. Pick any random square inch and the odds are that
| you will land on flesh or hair. That gets different on
| eyeballs, but they are still just bags of goo connected to
| muscle. The devil there is in the details of the blood
| vessels and the iris and things.
|
| And then you get to teeth, which are like wet rocks. You're
| building this thing that is going to bomb if it can't do
| soft, meaty, hairy things convincingly and then there's
| this itty bitty section you're only going to see sometimes
| that is a dark membraneous cave full of wet rocks.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I'm not a figure modeller but I heavily use the Genesis 8
| digital human from Daz 3D [0]
|
| My guess is that teeth haven't been that interesting to
| date and that the modellers don't have access to hundreds
| of reference pictures / geometries of teeth for their
| modelling. As opposed to reference images of skin textures,
| etc. Tongues are probably the same. In fact I don't think I
| have ever created a render of a figure with their tongue
| out.
|
| Once they take the time, the teeth should be easy to
| improve.
|
| [0] https://www.daz3d.com/technology/
| Budabellly wrote:
| I would say that modeling teeth with geometry is very
| easy. The material, lighting, and rendering is the
| challenge, especially when you consider all of the
| occlusion (and hard/soft body dynamics) from your lips
| that is inevitable with teeth.
|
| Some form of subsurface scattering[1] is a must, and not
| easily done in games/apps because you can't really "bake"
| it like you do for most other textures to run
| performantly.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering#:
| ~:text=....
| cma wrote:
| I think one thing is they are translucent/subsurface
| scattering and the enamel->dentin layer shows through
| underneath in kind of volumetric ways. Even lower teeth
| will show through behind the tips of upper teeth a bit
| (with a standard overbite).
| rgovostes wrote:
| The first time I saw something like this was when Elder Scrolls
| IV: Oblivion used FaceGen (https://facegen.com/) for character
| customization. Realism has improved a tiny bit in the intervening
| 15 years.
| munificent wrote:
| Many years ago, someone told me a little heuristic to determine
| if any new technology is likely to be successful. It doesn't
| always pick winners, but it rarely picks losers:
|
| [_] Can this be used for porn?
|
| I think we have a winner here.
|
| (Other examples: 8mm film, VHS, the Internet, newsgroups, JPEG,
| streaming video, etc.)
| [deleted]
| coolspot wrote:
| > MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed app
|
| No piracy, no software ownership and all IP stays in Epic's
| datacenter.
| pkaye wrote:
| Software as a service.
| cma wrote:
| You can't copy the customizer (assuming it rebakes new
| occlusion maps and stuff based on the shape customization), but
| the final result is a bit more open ended than that:
|
| "You'll also get the source data in the form of a Maya file,
| including meshes, skeleton, facial rig, animation controls, and
| materials."
| Igelau wrote:
| Those teeth look disturbingly herbivorous.
| DethNinja wrote:
| Very impressive shaders, though I wonder what the performance
| will be. I guess these might be fine for single player games
| where there are 10 to 15 characters on screen at a time but I
| doubt they are ready for use cases in MMORPGs or similar games.
| Geee wrote:
| It's very impressive. The innovation here is the generator, that
| is able to generate realistically constrained geometry and
| materials. It's probably based on massive amount of 3D scans and
| GANs, or something similar.
|
| Notice that they're realtime rendered, so they don't look
| completely realistic, but that is the easy part that has been
| solved already. It's possible to render those characters with
| offline renderers and they will look photorealistic.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| They need to work on randomizing the left right symmetry a bit
| in their demos. Humans aren't perfectly symmetrical, and it
| adds a lot of character to faces.
| Arelius wrote:
| I strongly doubt there are any GANs involved, they are rarely
| used in production entertainment, and a solution doesn't really
| exist for vector geometry afaik. Likely very few scans as well.
| Just lots and lots of artist hours.
| Budabellly wrote:
| I'm with you that I doubt there are GANs running in real time
| here, however I don't know see why they wouldn't be using
| similar models for offline static asset generation.
|
| As far as scans go, it's much cheaper than you would imagine
| to get high quality face scans. Rigging them for animation is
| the real challenge, and I'd be really impressed if they were
| using GANs for rigging.
|
| For state of the art in this space.. check this out:
| https://twitter.com/ak92501/status/1311832183078879232
| Geee wrote:
| I don't think you can create constraint-based system with
| 'artist hours'. Just like you can't create realistic 2D face
| generator without a GAN. It has to be based on samples of
| real people. There exists lots of generators, such as Daz3D,
| but you can't create realistic results in these because of
| their simplistic model. I haven't tested this yet though, so
| I might be assuming things.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| They aren't photorealistic but most of them seemed pretty close
| to my eyes, like movie actors under perfect lighting with a bit
| too much makeup.
| ksec wrote:
| I think they have been close for a few years already. We are
| edging closer every year but it is still somewhat Digital.
| Which is sort of the end of the S curve taking a very long
| time to perfection. May be in 5 years time I can barely tell
| the difference.
|
| Edit: May be it is the Real Time Rendering.
|
| But the real innovation is achieving this in hours and not
| weeks or months.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I think this looks amazing. A+ work.
|
| Free alternatives I've explored are at least an order of
| magnitude worse than this, and often difficult to integrate.
| dagmx wrote:
| Some more useful links
|
| Announce trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3F1vZYpH8c
|
| Sample characters: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-
| US/learn/metahum...
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(page generated 2021-02-10 23:01 UTC)