Metahuman Creator is now available in early access

[animats]

Epic's Metahuman Creator is now out, in pre-release form. "MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-based app that empowers anyone to create photorealistic digital humans, fully rigged and complete with hair and clothing, in minutes."  You can apply for a free account. I'm in the queue.

This tool is browser-based. The heavy work is being done on Epic's server farm. The output is a file that can be read into Unreal Engine or Maya. So it ought to be possible to get  these characters into Second Life, with enough work. Unreal uses a different skeleton than SL does, but it's close enough to the bento skeleton that translation should be possible. Not easy, but possible.

Here's a technical overview. The system has automatic LOD generation, with up to 8 levels of detail. Vertex counts are tolerable by SL standards. Highest, for face closeups. is around 150,000, and lowest is around 125.

You can also take selfie videos with an iPhone and use them to generate facial animations.

Probably the biggest incompatibility is that UE4 has a real hair system, something SL lacks. So the "grooming" assets Metahuman Creator creates may not be usable..

Rendering this in SL properly needs a PBR renderer with subsurface scattering to make the skin look right. Some of the younger graphics Lindens seem to be interested in making that happen.

Game characters are about to climb out of the Uncanny Valley.

 

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Give us those juicy wireframe views.

[Tonk Tomcat]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Vertex counts are tolerable by SL standards.

 

2 hours ago, animats said:

Highest, for face closeups. is around 150,000

.... SL standards.  I wonder in what reality somebody think this is a standard for a 18 year old plattform.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 5/2/2021 at 10:52 PM, Tonk Tomcat said:

 

.... SL standards.  I wonder in what reality somebody think this is a standard for a 18 year old plattform.

Or anything but a carefully optimized singleplayer game.

[Coffee Pancake]

Porting this content to SL is a terrible idea. I expect this to be the norm by xmas.

[animats]

I've been trying MetaHuman Creator. It lets me generate variants on the stock human models, but I can't do much with them. Exporting to Maya is supposed to work, but doesn't. Sent in a bug report. There's a licensing restriction on the Early Access version - for now, you have to render in-game with Unreal Engine to use it for free.

It's really, really slow. It's running mostly on some server farm, takes several minutes to start, and about 15 minutes to generate a character once the settings are set. Making changes takes about 10 seconds. It requires a current generation graphics card to use all the features, but you don't have to turn on real time ray tracing. Runs in the browser. Complains that Firefox is not a supported browser but runs fine. This is on Linux; it also is supported on Windows 10 and MacOS.

Highest LOD (0 of 0..7, smaller numbers are higher detail) You can zoom in on the eyes and all the detail is there.

 

LOD 5 (of 0..7) Just to see what a lower LOD is like. Below LOD 2, the hair drops to a simplified system.

No vertex counts; I haven't been able to download anything useful yet. However, published numbers are in the ranges we see for SL avatars. Don't yet know how compatible the assets will be with SL. The body bones are about the same, but I'm not sure about facial structure.

Anyway, that gives you an idea of what the latest generation of tools looks like.

[Tonk Tomcat]

6 hours ago, animats said:

However, published numbers are in the ranges we see for SL avatars.

So, published numbers show that this does NOT belong into SL nor into any other multiplayer 'game', same as 90% of the current mesh content in SL, that is nothing more than a lag producing high-poly ddos-like attack to every SL user.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Tonk Tomcat

[Candide LeMay]

9 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Porting this content to SL is a terrible idea. I expect this to be the norm by xmas.

Last Christmas I gave you my lag...

 

 

 

(no I don't care that y'all are now stuck with that song in your head)

[Coffee Pancake]

59 minutes ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

So, published numbers show that this does NOT belong into SL nor into any other multiplayer 'game', same as 90% of the current mesh content in SL, that is nothing more than a lag producing high-poly ddos-like attack to every SL user.

It's more 30% bad content, 70% how we use it. (not saying the content isn't bad, just that we're so far past that being the main problem).

Avatars meshes are bad. Avatars being made from a dozen overlapping independently rigged meshes is what's stealing your lunch money.

[Tonk Tomcat]

30% bad mesh is like, very unrealistic. I never see anybody who's wearing optimized mesh. You can go to every event you want and check the meshes there. Or go to all "famous" stores and inspect their meshes. There are a handful of the more known creators who really create optimized meshes, but the majority rushes out highpoly sh*t only. And you can inspect all the avatars running around to see the polycount: 100-300k tris in the shoes, 100k+ tris pants, 150k+ tris tops, + avatar + hair + a ton of accessories. It's easy to see avatars with over a million polygons and way over 500mb of textures. And to just have a clue: A current triple A multiplayer game character has close arround 100k tri count, per character. So yes, the meshes are lagging down everybody, and thats something LL can't fix with "improving" anything in the background, because every single thing we see has to be rendered by the graphics card. The majority of SL meshes does not belong in here or anywhere else. It's a nice to see thing for taking some pictures and take off after, but def nothing to run around and forcing others to have to render all that sh*t on their machines. And yes, in my eyes that's the main problem. Compared to the earlier days of SL we was able to move and walk around, even if there was more than 10 ppl around. The only thing besides some rubber-banding was the grey avatars. Nowadays my computer sounds like a starting aircraft when i go to some events, and thats all because of highpoly meshes.

[Coffee Pancake]

22 minutes ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

30% bad mesh is like, very unrealistic.

In terms of the impact it has on performance .. bad high poly mesh is just plain bad - it's bad, don't get me wrong. animating a dozen meshes on an avatar is something else entirely.

I work on the Catznip viewer with kitty, profiling viewer performance (with external tools) has consumed a significant amount of our lives lately.

[Tonk Tomcat]

Yeah, it all adds. But, let's say, you layer optimized rigged meshes, the impact should be way less, no? Because the rigging in the end is the weighted paints on all vertices. Less vertices = less weights = less impact on performance. If you wear high-poly rigged meshes, there's a ton of rigging information for that mesh, so in the end, the polycount is a significant source of lag for the rigging again.

[Coffee Pancake]

On 5/4/2021 at 12:46 PM, Tonk Tomcat said:

Yeah, it all adds. But, let's say, you layer optimized rigged meshes

If we really wanted to fix this problem in a meaningfully correct way , the easy solution would be to significantly limit the number of concurrent animations and rigged objects an avatar can have (note! objects not attachments. an attachment can be made of multiple objects).  More rigged mesh slots could even be a premium upgrade perk (like the number of attached animesh already is), this obviously breaks the entire avatar dress up ecosystem in the short term.

The hard-mode correct solution would be to bake all an avatars mesh into a single model with a single rigged skeleton the moment they appear in scene, but this breaks so many aspects of assumed SL functionality.

Back to the mess we have, in the context of a typically dressed crowd, how optimized individual mesh components might be is irrelevant. Even if they were all "optimized", it would still represent a considerable CPU time sink. Death by a thousand cuts is still death even if the cuts are slightly smaller.

It's really easy to point out bad high poly count models, I've done it myself, but those alone aren't the problem and fixing those alone won't return meaningful benefits. That's not to say we shouldn't aggressively push creators for better quality content, even if at this point it's akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. 

 

[Tonk Tomcat]

Ahh now i understand the problem. Wow. I never thought every rigged item really comes with the skeleton instead of just a table of weights for each affected vertices. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to have just a single skeleton and each item says what vertice move with what bone? At least thats how i would try to do something like that.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 5/18/2021 at 2:24 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

The hard-mode correct solution would be to bake all an avatars mesh into a single model with a single rigged skeleton the moment they appear in scene, but this breaks so many aspects of assumed SL functionality.

Useless unless they can also consolidate the draw calls however.

[Coffee Pancake]

15 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Useless unless they can also consolidate the draw calls however.

It's not the rendering part, it's the resolving stacked animations and contorting the mesh part - it has to be done every frame for every object for every attachment for every avatar. Fewer draw calls would be really nice, but wouldn't solve the bulk problem.

(If this were a game, it would be almost like every single rigged mesh object is it's own avatar .. kinda sorta very almost)

[Kyrah Abattoir]

11 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It's not the rendering part, it's the resolving stacked animations and contorting the mesh part - it has to be done every frame for every object for every attachment for every avatar. Fewer draw calls would be really nice, but wouldn't solve the bulk problem.

(If this were a game, it would be almost like every single rigged mesh object is it's own avatar .. kinda sorta very almost)

Isn't each draw call processed as a separate mesh? And yeah most MMOs consolidate as much as they can per-avatar to process as much as possible in one go.

[VirtualKitten]

Haha I expect they will never get any of it to upload as all i am getting is computer messages back not human reasons for upload failures