Metahumans

Thanks to Channel News Asia for having me on the “Why It Matters” show (CNA insider, TV broadcast Dec-21).  The program was hosted by Joshua Lim and produced by Tanny Chia, with the topic: Avatars and Metaverse. Special credit goes to photographer and VR influencer Norman Ng to set us up. The idea was, to create a Metahuman avatar of Josuha the host, that would later be used with a performance capture setup. I used reference photos of Joshua Lim to eyeball his likeness using the awesome features of Epic Games Metahum Creator (beta). We later used the Epic games iPhone app for the facial animation performance capture using the Unreal Engine 5 (early access) editor. During the interview, we covered a lot of topics, not all made it into the show (such as my ramblings on Death Tech and Digital Immortality), but I was able to show my VR design workflow beyond Unreal, using for example Akeytsu for Ready Player Me avatar add-on modifications, plus messing with character hair meshes in ShapeLab and ideating using  ShapesXR on the Meta Quest. Most of the interview was shot at PIXEL (Infocomm Media Development Authority, Singapore) and my home office in Woodlands Singapore. The 18 minute Metahumans footage (on the right) shows the various character design features used in the process, including aging/de-aging, body shapes, hair, teeth and facial feature changes.