The Plastic Wax team used MetaHuman Creator to add details on the Bride’s face, generating different skin patches, scars, and imperfections by combining six different Bride variants into one. “In the original film, the Bride of Frankenstein was only shown for three minutes. This was our opportunity to make her the ringleader and put her in charge,” says McCreery, explaining that working in real-time enabled the team to produce a more creative final result.“Real-time ramped everything up to a level that I hadn’t really experienced before. Your decision-making has to be quick and more from the gut, and I feel like you get a better result when it’s your first gut instinct that you react to,” he explains. “Using Unreal Engine, I was receiving MetaHuman models that I could work on top of. They were textured, lit, and just these beautiful base structures. Within literally a day or two, I had the final look of our design. It was just a game changer for me as a designer.”
Making Monsters with real-time animation
While the character models were being finalized, the project’s action-packed fight was created with the help of both real-time motion capture and more traditional hand keying to finesse each character’s final movements. Each performer’s body movements were first captured using Vicon Shōgun, before being retargeted onto the MetaHuman rig using MotionBuilder. The Plastic Wax team then recorded all facial animation using an iPhone 12 and Unreal Engine’s Live Link Face app, which streamed detailed movements—including realistic lip syncs—directly from the actors onto their virtual MetaHuman characters.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog