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Yeah, I used an HMC with my iPhone, calibrated using the supplied checkerboard pattern. I also marked up my face. I found the work involved was barely worth the results. When Epic leaked MetaHumans, I was in the process of designing a 4D rig for my HMC. That project is on hold now until the rollout of MH and I see what the companies are developing for it. Dynamixyz was supposed to be releasing a new product based on 3d scans and machine learning. It was due last summer but there hasn't been a whisper of it. I am wondering if they are having problems with the development.
This might be of interest to some:
I'm working on bringing to Daz the same kind of character facial customization that MetaHuman has.
Daz3d needs to hire you.
Wow!
that is very cool Faux2d
Can you also bring over the IK and realtime render platform , thx!
Detailed info for iPhone and Live Link in this video.. still don't know if I'm going to get a used iPhone or iPad Pro.
Heh, I made a Puppeteer setup to morph figures a long time ago...it worked, but it got confusing quickly and one click when you're in the wrong mode will wipe your progress with no way to undo it. Be sure to explain how to use this VERY WELL when it's released, I don't want you to have to go through a 20-page thread of people ranting and demanding refunds because they didn't understand how this works.
I feel you. Pupeteer goes into Edit mode by default when you load it so most likely everyone's going to have all their work undone at some point. This is why I'm getting into Daz scripting, I hope to maybe be able to create my own widget to avoid such situations.
I save my puppeteer animations as animated poses checking or unchecking the appropriate options in the expanded tree
Solomon Jagwe made some mouth improvements...he didn't say what he did...maybe another tute is coming.
MetaHuman won't make DAZ obsolete, because it will be cloud based and this means no control and no modifying of those barbie/ken characters and they will all be some kind of "lookalikes", a problem all "ingame character creation systems" do have. They seem to have just one skin texture and one normal map (for aging effect), where you can set the strength etc.
As for the cloud: If they decide to take the application down, it will be instantly forgotten as if it never existed.
Another point is the horrendously bad performance (like with every object/mesh using materials with an extensive blueprint setup) which makes it impossible to use it in open world environments. With UE5 you will still have to reduce polycounts for skeletal meshes (and foliage). Only static meshes
won't need a LOD system anymore. That's the reason why they have shown only some dead dessert environment in their promo, but no huge forests.
The hair technology you see in the examples is something UE4 specific and probably can be used with any character, no matter if DAZ, MakeHuman etc.
As for those nice skins: This is nothing special, just some good PBR textures (with some additional maps, not just diffuse,specular and normal) with an advanced shading/blending algorithm. You only need some good textures and can freely copy the blueprint node setup and voila you have a similar skin quality.
I've heard somewhere that DAZ uses this PBR technology to a more advanced degree as well with the new Victoria 8.1?
And I'm sure that MetaHuman won't have the full range of morphs, clothing options, hairstyles, bone driven morph targets like DAZ has and it probably won't have even full human bodies. Hell, the standard UE4 version doesn't even have Dual Quaternion skinning, so the characters either will deform badly or they will always have some clothing on in order to hide the bad deformations.
To conclude I can say it will be very limited and not usable outside of UE, so any modding on a broader scale will be impossible, maybe with the exception of some minor adjustments.
More new tips to get better performance from iPhone for capture (ethernet, and more light!) and a tip for getting the mouth to close. Might help someone.
you speak my words Macislav
the question is: what will i use this app for ?
most daz users do stills
a minority animations
now tell me what would you use this for ?
Animation. No real point in using unreal for stills, unless you're one that turns up samples too high and have ultra long renders.
I agree that this does not compete directly with the still render portrait/pin up demographic from the Daz studio user base.
They are likely targeting companies that need virtual Avatars for adverts and perhaps even virtual media personalities
and of course Digital replacement stunt actors for movie productions and Game cinematics.
This is where the growth is projected to be....ANIMATION!!
Not sure where Daz will look next for market growth in stills
,unless poser finally dies
Daz is not only for still renders, but also for using animations in UE4. For a minimal game you just need a walk, run, jump and idle animation and you have a fully working character.
It fits perfectly into the realistic scenes from UE4, even with the standard skin setup (diffuse,specular,normal).
In some scenes you will need to play around with the post processing (setting the scene darker...) or change the light setup. UE4 has the problem that either the lighting is too dark inside or too bright outside, but I hope
that it will be solved with UE5.
I'm using DAZ characters for "playing" animations in UE4 all the time. The difficult part is to create animations, where you need something like Reallusions CC3 framework.
But daz characters are the only ones, which deform well with different poses/animations.
Not even CC3 can compete with DAZ, because CC3 characters have no shape keys (and the bodies look too stylized (compare hip area and legs etc.)
MetaHuman will be even more limited with just a few morph sliders for some important body parts like Sims 3. What looks good is the UE4 "skin shader", but the head mesh is nothing special and it looks awfull in daylight. Besides this if you look under the sleeve or under the pant leg there is nothing (no body).
I've got the impression that MetaHuman is meant more for simulating "talking heads" (cinematic scenes with mostly close-up views of faces for psychothrilles etc. with much talking) than for animating full characters.
DAZ has a uniqe variety of full realistic characters, clothing, skins, hair.... selection, face and body types and can be used with multilayered clothing, all in all something which is unparalelled so far.
well the majority of games using a "character customization system" indeed are not too good at "old characters" since majority of peoples like to play with "young characters" then making old characters is not something "comon" but a really strong character customization is the black desert online, he is the most advanced system and it do have "different maps for "old ages" for characters, you can really make almost any person in real world using the BDO character customization it have a lot of details, the only games which would need a more "detailed system" would be games like the sims or life simulation where you must have a good character customization, but since we have only the sims as life simulation indeed make hard to have really complex characters customizations system but indeed you give me a good idea which i was not thinking about in my project, would be really interesting to have different "age details maps".
going back to the metahuman, what is matter is "how much family friendly" those characters are, i means if they can be "nude" if they have "dolls body(no gens or niples for females), which is the big difference for daz, in daz you can buy chararacters to make from "family friendly online renders or games or animation to even 'porn" with characters having full nude body, it make daz characters more desirable to use for non family friendly, unless you buy a metahuan and make yourself "the missing parts"
so far what i saw, making animations inside daz are not th "ideal" the same as currently unreal, you would make animatios in others softwares like MB or blender or even maya then bring to daz or unreal.
unreal characters can have "corrective morphs", this is something which epic and many triple AAA games use to make characters "bend" more realistic when semi-nudes or when showing some skin like arms and you need to feel realistic, you have some system to compesate the lack of dual quart, it is more troublesome but this is the way they choose, it's not perfect or not too good as dual quart but also dual quart itself is not perfect and have its own issues this is why also "daz characters" also have they own corrective morphs", which combine with dual you can get more close to achiev realistic animations, and if i'mnot wrong the metahuman characters also have correcitve morphs., again the real issue for me is if you can export morphs with the character like daz and how much "realistic are the body" or if they are "barbie/ken dolls" body, also how much cash you have to buy stuffs like top grade mocap tools and the most complex softwares for manual animation and really professional animators, if you can afford to pay for all, then don't matter if it's daz or metahuman or others character if you have money to pay for all the "cut offs" then you can have a really awesome character with the same quality level what is matter is "money" which is the issue for us "poor mortals",
about hair indeed the groom system from unreal is really flexible enough to be usable on almost "any character" as long it's proportions are not too different from the source, then we can have a chance to create a character with methahuman get the beards and hairs then get those "beards and hairs and add into a daz characater.
the only issue on daz characters is really the texture, which any generation under 8.1 lack of a lot of details map or are using a really "old way" to add details which in metahuman you have a more complex map system adding a lot of map details making possible to create really unique characters with few clicks.
3DU's Toon Generations 1 was used in a sequence for Sid the Science Kid on PBS a way back in 2012. Although 3DU isn't really DAZ 3D though.
Solomon's ethermet gadget and mouth tip.
Thumb issues....
here more news about metahuman
now where is the competition (which is the topic here) when this is used for face animation most of the time ?
very few people do this in DS now i think
I would imagine that the OP was reffering to the competitive level of photorealism compared to Daz figures.
When it comes to complex body animation it is assumed that most of the MH users will be using Autodesk MOBU/Maya for their animation.
This is why Autodesk will be officially supported straight away by the MH figures
Yes, I believe as well the OP meant the level of competition revolves around the quality of Daz figures and the new MetaHumans. The facial riggings play an important part in both now and with the MetaHumans a notch up in animation and realism. More people have been trying animation in Daz Studio based on numerous comments lately but it is still difficult for many though not impossible. Animation is the direction for many but the still render crowd will be here.
It is certainly understandable that the still render majority
will continue to be the dominant majority of the Daz studio user base
Yes one can create Character animations with Daz studio
and the face mojo tool is a great addition.
However to create truly cinematic looking productions
you need object based motion Blur and volumetric lighting to say nothing of a modern IK solver.
Growth comes from new user/Buyers.
lateral sales to existing customers is not growth... it is stagnation
(See Poser)
For those just entering the fast growing world of solo animated films UE4/5 with the meta humans will be "insane" competion for those who cannot compete with the rendering& IK tools(Like Daz)
or cannot compete with the
price and figure/rendering quality( Reallusion)
I am just thankful I migrated to Blender 11 months ago
as it competes on all fronts and surpasses on many others
( content creation& VFX ).
There's an important thing people are overlooking: Unreal Engine is free but everything else needed to make MetaHuman viable isn't.
How many animations have you seen people create that even come close in quality with what's shown in the MetaHuman presentation video?
Genesis is free but everything needed to make it viable is not
(Hd morphs ,clothing, skins ,hair)
Also how many people are doing really good facial/lipsynch perfomances
with G8, without having to spend $$$hundreds of dollars$$$ on face MOJO and an $$Iphone$$
I agree that UE4 does not have viable Character animation toolset
but I disagree with those who assume/predict that epic has one in the works.
Why try to compete with Autodesk's fully matured Character animation toolset and the deeply entrenched pipeline habits of the industry pros that use them.
It is no mystery to me why Maya is the first major platform that will be directly supported by the metahuman figure system.
Maya & MOBU are the major softwares used to create game animation
and Epic clearly intends to be the major prefabbed figure supplier for that community as well as those interested in the types of realtime animated film projects that are not possible with slow brute force path tracers like NVIDIA Iray .
There are indeed more extensive character animation products in the works from Epic. This isn't an assumption. I was informed MetaHuman was coming months in advance. Even still, it surprised me how they've appeared to hit the mark so cleanly (for their target market). Epic didn't acquire 3Lateral and Cubic Motion for no reason. Tools are being developed (that I have seen) as we speak. Industry giants like Autodesk hold a lot of clout and inertia, but don't mistake their overweight representation in Hollywood for permanence. They have been put on notice to adapt and evolve to this situation or risk obsolescence. I am a hardcore Maya user, but even I can see the unique changes that Epic is bringing to the creative world.