I'll be honestly...I didn't think I'd get this far in my project. There have been 6 softwares I've used so far and every single on has been a learning curve. Now it's time to add another one...or two.
I started by facial expression journey by trying out Unreal Engine's Metahuman software. I relied heavily on Youtube tutorials for this. This was my first time tryiing out Metahuman and Unreal Engine 5.
With Metahuman, I was only able to my original head mesh for the character. This is what I focus on through this exploration.
I set up my mesh in Unreal 5 and when it was ready imported it into Metahuman Creator. To follow the pipeline, I used skin and eye textures as well as eyebrows and hair Metahuman Creator provided. I wasn't able to use any of my original textures.
To the right is what my character looked like once I finished in Metahuman Creator
I went back to Unreal 5 and did a quick a lighting setup to test out a few facial expressions from the pose library. There were lots of different facial expressions and it was very easy to adjust it to your liking using keyframes. I really enjoyed experimenting with this part of my exploration.
Facial Expression test in Unreal Engine 5
Overall Metahuman was cool but I wouldn't be able to use most of the assets I built. So I won't be using Metahuman for my project. I then too a different route through 3D Scan Store's free Multi Expression Base Mesh.
To make this work, I decided to use a 30-day free trial for R3DS Wrap. I followed the tutorials pretty closely and quickly got the results I needed.
3D Scan Store Free Multi Expression Base Mesh
My Zbrush Sculpt
Both meshes after creating points
Zbrush Mesh after wrapping
After some projecting and clean up in Zbrush, my mesh was able to be morphed in a non-destructive way and I immediately felt relief and excitement. This will take the project to the next level. These images are two tests I did on my high poly model.
I did a quick turnaround in Blender to get a better idea of the head as a whole
