from epic games. my name is kai. i m a metahuman, just like all the others. and it s my first day on thejob. yes, the technology used to create these characters, these digital renderings of humans, hasjust become a lot easier, faster and accessible to more of us. ally humphreys has been finding out more. today s filming location is pretty epic. i have come to the london innovation lab, home to some of the team at unreal engine. they are owned by epic games, the makers of the hugely popular fortnite. what is unreal engine? well, it s software that allows actors to be fully immersed in virtual worlds. yep, not only is it used for building games, but has since evolved for use in virtual production, where the digital and physical worlds meet. it s an industry that is still growing with epic games being instrumental in making this technology shift happen.
we ve seen short films and performances. speaks japanese. i was intrigued to find out what a professional would do with dana, so i enlisted the help of swedish 3d artist anton palmqvist. he had already been experimenting with metahuman, and made these fantastic characters. oh, wow! she looks so much more real, doesn t she? it s pretty much a game changer, because it can be really, really expensive to hire a character artist to do these kind of really detailed humans before, or if you scan it yourself, you would have, like, a huge scan rig, and that s super expensive. so now, we can get to do these things just for free, like this, with the tools that they have released for us. i think people are fascinated with photoreal digital humans. like, how can i create something absolutely lifelike and how people run with that i think is still to be seen,
and so now, it s not only game designers who use this, but tv and movie studios too. but i m not here to talk about virtual production. i am here to look at epic games new tool for creating digital humans. meet dana. she s 2a, like dogs more than people, and studies art in new york. oh, and she doesn t actually exist. i made her in half an hour. she was made using unreal engine s new metahuman creator. whereas once only professionals could make digital characters look this real, now it s open to anyone. normally it s in the weeks and months for an artist to create a single face, but our intent was to reduce that down to minutes, so you can actually create a plausible, photoreal digital human in half an hour, no problem. and in that time, this is how i made dana. so i ve got a database of over 50 characters here and i can choose four
my name is kai. i m a metahuman, just like all the others. and it s my first day on thejob. yes, the technology used to create these characters, these digital renderings of humans, hasjust become a lot easier, faster and accessible to more of us. alex humphreys has been finding out more. today s filming location is pretty epic. i have come to the london innovation lab, home to some of the team at unreal engine. they are owned by epic games, the makers of the hugely popular fortnite. what is unreal engine? well, it s software that allows actors to be fully immersed in virtual worlds. yep, not only is it used for building games, but has since evolved for use in virtual production, where the digital and physical worlds meet. it s an industry that is still growing with epic games being instrumental in making this technology shift happen.
like metahuman for catfishing, which is when someone pretends to be someone they are not. if i was a catfisher, i would much rather use this kind of fabricated photorealistic imagery rather than trawling the alt web, looking for actually existing photographs out there. so in that respect, it will make catfishing much more harder to detect. people leverage other people s photos and you know, so it s very hard to say in what ways would ill minded people use this? but the amount of work that s required to do something like that, i think you would have to be extremely talented to actually get to a level where you can pull that off. which would be a strange use of talent, but. tech like the metahuman creator is a long way off being able to replicate humans completely. at the moment, its main use will be for creating secondary or non playable characters in games. but with tools like this making digital humans accessible to everyone and anyone, we will certainly be seeing more of them in fu