How Unreal Engine 5’s MetaHuman tech has enabled River End Games to elevate its storytelling for Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream

Anders Hejdenberg: When we began pre-production of this game, the only two game engines that were viable options were Unreal Engine and Unity. At that point in time, Unity had yet to implement PBR in its rendering pipeline, so Unreal Engine became the natural choice.

MetaHuman wasn’t available at this point, so it wasn’t until later that we adopted the technology. Before MetaHuman, we had another pipeline in place with a face-scanning rig that we built ourselves. The results were really good, but it was a very slow and tedious process.

AH: It’s a very powerful tool that allows for a lot of customisation, but this is only part of the equation. An aspect that is easily overlooked is just how difficult it can be to create realistic shaders for skin, eyes, teeth, and hair – but all of these are included in the package.

Epic has done all that work for you, which would be very difficult to do yourself unless you’re already an expert. Not to mention the rig setup to control the blends between facial expressions, and how that is tied into blends between normal maps and textures.

The facial rig setup that comes with MetaHuman is of a very high standard, so you don’t have to be an expert there either. All of this combined makes MetaHuman an extremely useful tool, especially for smaller teams that don’t necessarily have the resources or know-how to do those things themselves.

AH: MetaHuman Creator allowed us to quickly create believable characters with a very wide range of facial expressions. But the other part of the equation is MetaHuman Animator that does a tremendous job of capturing our actors’ performances and applying it as animation data to the facial rig.

Before MetaHuman Animator, there was quite a wide gap in terms of capability in software that’s available to the public and software being used at VFX companies. It essentially meant that you either had to do a great deal of hand animation to get good results, or you had to write your own software - which is what a lot of VFX companies have done. But MetaHuman Animator changed that in a very significant way.

AH: For performance reasons we use baked lighting in Eriksholm, but for our cinematics we use Lumen since those are pre-rendered movies. Using Lumen in our cinematics allows us to tweak or re-arrange the lighting for each shot in a scene dynamically, which is a very useful process in order to get each shot looking as good as possible.

AH: There are a lot of customisation options in MetaHuman Creator, but you can also use the Mesh to MetaHuman feature to make small or large adjustments as well.

AH: The fact that MetaHuman Animator’s solve is not based on just 2D video data, but 3D mesh data generated from stereo video input, means that you get a much better solve where very subtle nuances of the actor’s performance are captured in a very convincing way.

AH: The only problems we’ve encountered so far have been related to creating very young characters, where there’s not a whole lot in the database to work from. But we manage to overcome it by blending multiple types of characters together, and using the Mesh to MetaHuman feature for additional tweaks to proportions.

AH: I would say that it would probably take twenty times longer to create characters with our previous pipeline. But it’s not just that – with our previous pipeline we would scan real people, which means that you also have to find those people and negotiate contracts with them.

There’s also the aspect that once you had a finished character, it was a very tedious process to make adjustments to it – so you really had to stick with what you had. With MetaHuman Creator on the other hand, you can try a character out in a scene – and if you don’t like a certain aspect about it, you can just change it in the tool.

Even though we’re just 17 people on the team, we would’ve been able to make it with our previous pipeline – but now with MetaHuman we could spend that time and effort on the game itself instead.

AH: What I’m looking forward to the most is not necessarily technical innovations, but rather new ways of thinking about a game’s story, design, characters and environments to make the experience even more meaningful to the player. I love that there are always new frontiers to explore when it comes to the player’s experience.

AH: I think that we’ve come a really long way the last ten years in terms of democratising the means of production. You don’t have to have a large team and a huge budget to make something truly great anymore, because there are so many tools readily available to the public. MetaHuman is a great example of this, and part of a trend that I think will continue. A future that is much more about coming up with interesting ideas than overcoming barriers of entry.