Updated: An earlier version of this article contained language many in the Deaf community find offensive. The author and TheGamer would like to formally apologize. This article has been amended thanks to the patience and understanding of Kara Technologies.
Unreal Engine is used in a lot of games these days, from the upcoming Biomutant to the flight combat game Project Wingman. It’s a robust, easy-to-use engine that cuts down on the time it takes to develop games by many factors.
And it’s about to get a massive upgrade when it comes to animating people. Unreal’s new MetaHuman Creator is a new cloud-based streaming app that lets developers make believable human characters in “less than an hour.” It’s like a character creator in a game, only it’s for any game that you plan to make in Unreal. Once that character is done being made, it comes fully rigged and ready to be animated in Unreal Engine.
And these avatars look so good that frankly, it’s a little creepy. Epic released two sample characters that were created in MetaHuman Creator, and both of them are so realistic that it’s hard to tell that they’re not even real people.
Games are the most likely application of MetaHuman Creator, but Kara Technologies has another idea for Epic's new toy. Kara is the New Zealand-based company that developed Niki, a virtual avatar that can translate "a variety of media content such as video, audio, or text into a signed language.”
Niki isn’t just some avatar moving her hands, though. Niki’s facial expressions also come fully animated with hundreds of microexpressions--an important facet in communicating with the Deaf community.
However, it looks like Niki might have some competition. Kara released an updated version of its signing avatar using one of the MetaHuman models that Epic released with MetaHuman Creator, and it took less than a week for this incredible animation to be born. Kara hopes that MetaHumans may one day lead to an even better signing avatar than Niki that could include a fuller range of human expressions and reduce project turn-around by as much as 80%.