"It's a me!" Animating myself as a MetaHuman using Performance Capture
It's a me! I wanted to try to combine my knowledge of motion capture together with facial performance capture. This idea ended up with a MetaHuman of myself in UE5 where I used a premade motion capture from Mixamo for the body, but for the face I used the Live Link Face app on iOS and captured a monologue which I also recorded the audio from using DaVinci Resolve Fairlight track recorder.
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I started out by creating the MetaHuman using the online tool MetaHuman Creator which I then transferred over to Quixel Bridge and imported it into Unreal Engine 5.1. Once in there I applied the Mixamo body animation and set up a scene with studio lighting. The final step was to record the facial animation and this is the part where I spent the majority of the time trouble shooting. The head didn't want to stick to the body and I also had issues with head rotation. But after diving into the skeleton node graph I managed to get it sorted.
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The performance capture and audio was recorded at the same time using DaVinci Resolve Fairlight and the Take Recorder in UE5. The final take I was happy with was take 29 I believe, so it took me a while to nail all face animations I wanted. The critical director in me took over haha.
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All in all I spent around 20 hours on the entire project.
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✉️ For any business inquiries, email me at michael@tiedtke.se
👋 For any personal questions DM me at www.instagram.com/tiedtke
Final render with real time performance capture in UE5. I've cut the monologue though as I'm saving it for another project.
Trying out the performance capture using Live Link Face app on iOS, this time on my iPad Gen 9.
Retargeting the body animation from Mixamo to the MetaHuman was a breeze thanks to the IK Retarger in UE5.
Overview of the scene in Unreal. I utilized the Camera Dolly Track together with the Cine Camera actors.
Creating the MetaHuman using MetaHuman Creator online tool.
Reference i.e. myself
Printscreen from final render.