MetaHuman Animator (Epic)
App : A product you use directly
Facial and body animation of digital humans from a camera, inside Unreal Engine, now free.
The highest quality available for a 3D avatar, free under the Unreal Engine licence.
Security reflects where data goes, requested permissions and incidents on record at the verification date. It is not a guarantee of zero risk: check the deployment mode and the connections you enable.
What it does, concretely
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.
What it offers
- ·High-fidelity facial capture from an iPhone (TrueDepth camera) or a stereo head-mounted camera, processed offline for detailed results.
- ·Real-time facial animation from any mono camera, including a webcam, via the MetaHuman Live Link plugin.
- ·Combined face and body capture from a single standard camera, without markers or mocap suits, using the Markerless Motion Capture plugin (experimental feature, Unreal Engine 5.8).
- ·MetaHuman Identity creation from a few photos of the actor, automatically adapting the animation to the target digital character's proportions.
- ·Local GPU processing: video and depth data are analyzed directly on the machine, without sending performance data to the cloud.
- ·Animation export as an Animation Sequence or Level Sequence, compatible with Unreal Engine tools (Control Rig, Sequencer, ML Deformer).
- ·Pipeline automation via Blueprint and Python APIs to process takes in batch at scale.
- ·Audio-driven animation: facial motion generation from an audio source, with adjustable head movement, blinking, and emotion overrides.
In practice
- Price
- Free
- Commercial use
- Commercial use: yes
- Available on
- windows, macos
- Host
- unreal
- Licence
- Unreal EULA
- Runs locally
- Yes, 8 GB VRAM recommended
- FR interface
- No
Security and data
- Rating
- Security: nothing to flag
- Your data
- Local or cloud depending on use
- Maintenance
- Active
Links and repository checked on 25 October 2026 · added on 1 June 2023