 Creating a 3D model of a person from scratch is tough, and while modeling software and hardware has improved throughout the years, it still takes a ton of experience and a lot of work to take a collection of basic shapes and turn it into a photorealistic person. But hold on a second. What if we started with a finished person instead and then just tweaked them to look different? Well, that sounds kind of like the character creation tool in your favorite RPG, and those are often pretty decent, but they're always highly limited in terms of their sculpting options. That is, until now. Meet the Meta-Human creator. Wanna voodoo doll of your boss to kick around with ragdoll physics? Easy. Wanna photorealistic digital representation of the father you never had? Got you covered. Wanna waifu to... Whatever people do with those? Ew. Didn't need to know? But you got it! Wanna know about our sponsor, Ridge Wallet? Ridge Wallet wants to redefine- no, nay, have redefined the traditional wallet with their compact frames and RFID blocking plates. Keep your wallet bulbs down and use offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. With the Meta-Human creator, Epic has set out to give developers the ability to not only make character models quickly, but to a high level of detail. Now, it hasn't been officially released yet, but you can request access on their website, wait a few days, and bada-bing bada-boom, you've got your very own NPC factory at your disposal. The big question is, how do you get access to the game? Well, you can get access to the game by going to the website, and then you can get access to the game by going to the website, and then you can get access to the game by going to the website, straight away for dollar candy. to use as they say. To find out, I will be going mono a mono against our logistics manager, Matthias, who has a background in 3D modeling. Granted, he leans more towards architecture and structures, but he does have experience with character modeling as well. Anyway, if Epic did their job right, none of that should matter. I mean, this looks pretty easy, right? Who needs design school to make a fully rigged and cloved human when you've got the power of Unreal Engine 4? Speaking of clothing, too bad we can't clothe our models in LTT merch. That would be a fun Epic collab. For the next best thing, go to lttstore.com and clothe yourself with them. Now each of us will have 20 minutes to turn the same starting metahuman into a digital version of yours truly. Neither of us have touched the tool yet, and we'll both be using the same frontal and three quarter view profile pictures as references. Does this seem reasonable? How much time would it normally take to create a fully rigged and cloved person? Depending on the complexity, anywhere from a couple hundred hours to a couple thousand. Fortunately, my secret weapon is I have the advantage of seeing myself in the mirror every morning. Doesn't he get to see you every day? I don't think anyone's gonna call that an advantage. This is it? Yeah. There's no tutorial mission? No. We just go now? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I'm ready. How long do we get? Okay. Normally when we do these kinds of challenges, no matter how much experience I have, I'll just like come in like overly confident. I got nothing, I got no swagger. Face blend, what is blend? Oh my God, you take multiple characters and like put them together? And she's like looking at you and stuff the whole time. Holy crap, I am screwed. I'm pretty confident about this. It's relatively intuitive. It's pretty, you know, just point, click, drag. What the hell is happening? Okay, well that, how do I make my nose pointier? Absolutely zero prior experience. Ah. In game character creation tools, I usually just blitz through them as fast as possible because I play games to play games, not to stare at in game characters. My chances are basically zero. Thank you for making me say that out loud. I still haven't figured out how to change skin color at all. So that's a challenge, well that ain't it chief. Okay, what color is my skin? I don't know, never really thought about it. I went to school for a 3D animation, mostly for cinematics. So, you know, like cartoons and whatnot. Unfortunately, I never actually got a chance to do it, professionally at least. Until today. Until today, yeah. It's been a few minutes, what do you think of the UI and the user experience? It's great, but I'm having trouble. How about that? Okay, I have dark brown eyes, apparently. My eyes are dark. Okay, oh God, that smile, I don't look like that. Okay, my teeth are mostly white-ish I think, but they're a little yellow. Okay, makeup, oh God, no, we don't need any makeup. How do I turn it off? Thin liner, soft smokey. Okay, it needs more like off buttons, because this has eyeliner on it, I don't want it. So, do I just press X? No, oh God. The difference between say this and Maya is Maya, you have to drag around individual vertices and other features, and you have to like place individual polygons, where this is just, you know, nice click and drag, and you know, move it all around. Okay, color, here we go. What color is my hair? It's kind of, oh God, I'm so gonna lose this. That doesn't look anything like me though. It looks so much better than you. Yeah, it's very symmetrical. I'm not very symmetrical. As far as I can tell, there isn't any way to actually change or adjust the hair shapes on what the presets are. Which is kind of annoying. Okay, maybe we could change the pants to, yeah, that's more like it. Uh-huh. Okay, definitely hoodie, okay. Shoes, there we go, that's the closest we got. The child, shut up, I'm not that short. All right, I need to find some mother with a big nose, and I need to add that to my blend. Show me the like big old honking nose. Why do these people all have perfect adorable noses? Look how cute this guy is. Look at Jesse here. Like man, 10 out of 10 doable. I think they're gonna add a lot of stuff later on because it does feel like there's a lot of tweaks and details that are missing currently. Yeah, I mean, one thing you can't really adjust is, you know, eye separation, and that's in even some fairly basic character creation screens that I've seen. We can move them apart and stuff. Oh wow, okay. I'm gonna admit, this doesn't look quite like you, but I think that's just due to the limitations of the tool. Oh yeah, you're just gonna blame the tool. Well, when mine looks identical to me, who's gonna be laughing now? Oh my God, you can add more than three blend things. I'm just gonna leave Christopher in there. Okay, now we're just throwing stuff at the wall. Okay, okay, what about Pia? Let's throw Pia in here. Oh God, that's not it. Pia, get out. It seems like you're actually using your keyboard hand. Yeah. What kind of shortcuts do you use? Wait, what are you doing? Mostly just rotation and movements. I didn't even move the guy around at all. Do you need to do that? If you want a guy to get sculpted, of course you do. Cause if you get transition between two views, like you can actually see what you're doing. I think really this tool is designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. Okay. Okay. Okay, count us down. Three, two, one. They feel like Sims really. You definitely got the nose better. I couldn't figure out the nose tool. So basically I didn't actually blend anything. I just sculpted all manually. Really? Yes. So the tools I primarily used were the move and sculpt. Then I just integrated parts of the features to kind of get me a ballpark, then tuned with the movement sculpt. Interesting. Yeah, I definitely used blend, which it took me a while to figure out how to use. And then I went in with move and sculpt and then I made things worse. For the most part. I think the blend has a large potential to, you know, speed up all the workflow. The problem is, is like, I didn't want to waste time by learning a new tool when I could just do it faster myself. Right. If there's more hair customization, or if you could say sculpt the hair, like you could do the face, that would have made it so much better. I think with more time and experience, I could get it closer, but not a lot closer. It needs way more tools with respect to being able to like shape the face more. Or maybe, I mean, or actually yours is better, but it's hard to tell under the beard, but I felt like I couldn't draw in my cheeks enough. I constantly try to draw it in because you have quite. My cheeks are quite concave. Yeah. And then the nose. You can't do anything with the nose. It needs way more in terms of accessories. There's a lot of things about a person that are identifiable markers that you just can't put on. Like I have a mole, for example, that would really help go, oh yeah, that's Linus, or earrings or whatever. Which one looks more like Linus? I don't know, they're both pretty bad. Oh, ouch. Stab, don't twist. So these are both supposed to be Linus. Ouch. Okay. That's a bit of, I get a bit of an Asian vibe on this one here. I don't immediately get Linus vibes from either of them. So there's that. Okay, what am I doing? You need to decide which face looks more like your husband. But neither of them look like him. Honestly, the one on the right kind of looks like James to me. The one on the left, the hair is just too nice looking. Like it's all swept so neatly and Linus's hair is always just, like, like he just woke up, it's bed head. Why did I think it was a good idea to bring in someone who looks at me this much? Oh yeah, and did you get the ears being offside a little bit? I don't know. The one on the left just looks more fake, just in general. It just looks less like a real human. The one on the right, I don't know. Really, you know, I just, I can't get past the beard. It's just too much. It's just too much on the left. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I have experienced doing this because I've watched Linus do short circuits all the time. Both hairs, at least the hairstyles is off for sure. Yeah, the one on the right, I like the one on the right better. So the right one looks like what Linus wants to look like. Oh, shut up. And then the one on the left is right here. Neither. I think I'm gonna go with the one on the left just because this one looks too much like James to me. I'm gonna guess Matias made that one. Really? They do look like people. They just don't look like Linus. Like maybe the one on the right, like maybe a slightly younger Linus, but I've seen younger Linus and he didn't look like that. And I'm gonna predict, I think Matias did the one on the right. You're very wrong. What? Oh, I'm so sorry, Matias. That's fine. Now, if I'm allowed to guess who's done what. Don't look at us. Okay, okay, fine. I'm gonna guess that the left one was done by Matias and the right one was done by Linus. I'm gonna say that the left one was modeled by Linus, the super beardy one, just because Linus is a jokester and he would do that. I could see that being like the hero in your story and that's kind of like the... Oh man, I don't know why Luke just popped into my head. Blood word, blood word, where you going for here, hun? Nothing. Which one did you say looked more like me again? So James is the hero in your story, is that what you're trying to say? I'm gonna go down. I'm not a modern game development expert, but I think it's pretty obvious that this would help a lot in terms of creating extremely diverse looking crowds of people. I mean, we've seen so often where the main characters like this immaculately crafted 3D model. I think like the reboot Tomb Raider games are a great example where Lara Croft is just like this painstakingly created model. And then pretty much everyone else in the games is like, yeah, it looks like it was done five years ago, you know? Crowds of people with this level of diversity, with this amount of speed is definitely gonna increase my immersion because you see it so often where you're like, oh yeah, that's the same one with a palette swap. Like it takes you out of it. It's immersion breaking, whereas this can improve that like overnight. I think it has a great potential to replace a large amount of NPC creation in the scene where you need say, a hundred different characters all wandering around doing different things. It's absolutely great because it's rigged, textured and ready to go and easily deployable. You know, yeah, it's not great, admittedly. Not great, unlike our sponsor, Squarespace. You might've heard of them. They're a leader in website design and their all-in-one platform makes it easy to make your own website in minutes. You can make any website from a personal portfolio to a resume, to a fan fiction or even shopping. They've got website analytics tools that'll help you keep track of how your website's performing and find all the weak areas to make sure you get a steady stream of traffic. And you can even buy a domain through them as well as create email campaigns. Matt, they've got endless features. And if you have any trouble with any of their award-winning templates, all you've got to do is reach out to their customer support 24 seven and they will help you out. So head to squarespace.com slash LTT for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, you can get 10% off at our link down below. Well, wasn't that fun? I was, actually, you know what? We probably got closer than I expected. If you guys are looking for another fun video to watch, we recently did one with two simultaneously running games and people have to decide whether RTX is on or off. The results will shock you. That's me. Thanks, Yvonne.