Unreal Engine steals the show at GDC 2023 with MetaHuman Animator

Epic Games’ State of Unreal 2023 keynote at GDC quite literally changed the game. The announcement of Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), Unreal Engine 5.2 enhancements, and MetaHuman Animator as well as a host of other ecosystem tools, showed the industry the future. 

We’ve worked closely with the Unreal Engine team for over a decade using their tools, even helping them build more to empower creators and developers, so needless to say we’re fans and excited about the developments. Here’s a breakdown of what the updates mean for us and the wider community. 

MetaHuman Animator

This is the announcement that has been grabbing headlines. Unreal’s MetaHuman was a paradigm shift for creators when it was announced in mid-2021. Historically, delivering photorealistic character performances was extremely specialized and time-consuming. But with the new MetaHuman Animator — a new, next-level feature set for the MetaHuman framework — any facial performance capture can be transferred to a MetaHuman character with far greater fidelity and nuance than ever before. 

We can’t wait for the launch in the summer! 

Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN)

Since 2018, Fortnite has offered a toolset for users to create their own unique experiences, and there are now more than a million user-generated islands on the platform. UEFN is a pretty huge step forward for content creators as it allows anyone to upload their own content into a game platform that already has millions of players using a lightweight version of Unreal 5 created specifically for Fortnite. We’ve tried it out, and the session-linking is amazing — you can be running around testing out a level while someone else is also in the editor making changes which are reflected to everyone in real-time.

Three demo spaces, Forest Guardian, The Space Inside, and Deserted: Domination, are currently available to experience on Fortnite and showcase the possibilities for a whole new kind of experience within the platform. 

A unified 3D marketplace - Fab

Later this year, Epic is unifying its marketplaces — Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab, Quixel Bridge, and the ArtStation Marketplace — and launching Fab.com. This will make it easier for creators to access a wider range of digital assets — 3D Models, Materials, Sound, VFX, and more. It allows smaller creators to produce high-quality games and experiences quickly while enabling skilled 3D asset creators to generate income — on the platform, creators will earn an 88% revenue share.  

Unreal Engine 5.2

Unreal Engine 5 signified a giant leap forward in real-time rendering technology. Now, Unreal Engine 5.2 offers further refinement and optimizations, alongside hundreds of new features. One of the biggest is a new Procedural Content Generation (PCG) toolset. This will allow technical artists to easily create vast and dynamic worlds by setting certain rules and parameters for procedural world-building. 

Epic Games demonstrated how a highly detailed 4km x 4km environment was procedurally and artistically generated in harmony with smaller traditionally hand-placed level design. This gives artists the flexibility and ease to craft large-scale levels and for designers to make adjustments which can be populated interactively with production art.

Another major announcement is the introduction of the new Substrate shading system. Substrate was first introduced for early testing in Unreal Engine 5.1 and will be an experimental feature in version 5.2. With Substrate, artists will be able to compose and layer different shading models to get more control over the look of objects. This allows the creation of more complex and detailed materials for video games, cinematics, and films and continues to reinforce Epic’s commitment to pushing what’s possible in real-time technologies