MetaHuman Animator (Epic)

Creating convincing facial animation for a digital character traditionally requires expensive motion capture equipment and specialized teams. MetaHuman Animator solves this by enabling creators to transfer an actor's performance, filmed on an iPhone or a standard camera, onto a photorealistic MetaHuman character directly inside Unreal Engine, without dedicated hardware.

In practice, the workflow has two main stages. First, a MetaHuman Identity is created from a few images of the actor, generating a 3D mesh of their facial topology. The desired performance is then recorded, the footage is imported via the Capture Manager in Live Link Hub, and processing is launched through a MetaHuman Performance asset. The computation runs locally on the machine's GPU. The exported animation takes the form of an Animation Sequence or Level Sequence that can be reused in any Unreal project.

MetaHuman Animator is aimed at independent game developers, animation studios, and filmmakers who want high-fidelity facial and body animations without investing in a motion capture studio. The tool supports real-time facial capture from a webcam or iPhone, as well as combined face and body capture from a single camera via the Markerless Motion Capture plugin.

However, the tool is entirely tied to the Unreal Engine ecosystem and the MetaHuman format: it is not suited for those working with non-MetaHuman characters or other engines. The markerless body capture plugin is still in an experimental phase as of Unreal Engine 5.8 and is not recommended for final production use.