Last February, Epic Games announced MetaHuman Creator, an ultra-realistic character editor that aims to revolutionize the entertainment industry along with video games. The first technical demonstration was enough to surprise everyone with the potential of the tool. However, Epic isn’t the only one interested in taking advantage of Unreal Engine 5 when it comes to character realism.
Ziva Dynamics, a company based in Vancouver, Canada, is surprising the entire industry with ZRT Face Trainer, a facial animation technology whose level of realism is impressive.
The ZRT Face Trainer, which works in conjunction with Unreal Engine 5, is currently in beta, but the company has explained that the most complex expressions of a human being can be made in real-time. This application has been developed for all types of characters regardless of gender, ethnicity or species — so it could only be a preview of what we could see even in the Metaverse.
According to Ziva Dynamics, the technology is built on top of an extensive library of 4D data and proprietary machine learning algorithms. In total, according to Ziva Dynamics on its website, this library weighs 15 TB and offers up to 72,000 faces and facial poses. In just one hour, the program will make the best facial animation for a character in the history of the gaming industry.
In the following video, published as a demonstration, you can see the face generated in real-time on the left and the real model on the right:
Although Ziva points out that the ZRT Face Trainer is still an experimental technology, launching a beta is a key step to see the light of day in the near future. Obviously, the feedback from animators and developers will be crucial to improve their performance, which for now is already outstanding.
If you work in the sector and are interested in trying it, you can request access from the following link. Although the demo showed was created using Unreal Engine 5. Although, ZRT Face Trainer will not be exclusive to the Epic Games graphics engine.
