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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This production analysis, which draws from software studies and studies of visual culture, examines a tool that is fairly new to the arsenal of video game developer Epic Games—the in-development MetaHuman Creator that is part of the developer’s proprietary Unreal Engine—and poses the central question: Are the rapid prototyping and building tools of digital content delivering more diverse representations and narratives and supporting the free play of identity in playable media? The MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed application that lets content developers create high-fidelity digital characters without being steeped in the technical processes of character generation, rigging, animation and in-engine real-time functionality. Epic’s tool draws from a library of real scans of people and allows 3D content developers to quickly create unique photorealistic fully-rigged digital humans by mixing together different parts of real people while changing each character’s facial textures and geometries and updating the underlying rig. The tool allows visual artists to rapidly and seamlessly manipulate a character’s facial features, adjust skin complexion, and select from a range of preset body types. MetaHuman creation is a fluid of process, and the speedy transformation of character rigs and other non-binary attributes highlights the potential queerness or openness of data; yet commercial demonstrations and applications of the tool speed through a series of mutable subjects, and any assumed dynamism yields to stasis, to the construction of a functional and fixed character build of a certain physiognomic type.
The ongoing push toward (hyper)realism in commercial media has birthed a visual economy which is supported by an industrial apparatus that privileges mastery over the tools of production, and where bodies and politics are often cleaved in the design process. Epic’s multiethnic, multiracial, transgender MetaHuman Creator is a design tool and not a narrative engine. Its transitions are simple and seamless, and the traces of non-binary and non-white identities are simply part of a larger color palette. This paper argues that there is value in critical media praxis to interrogating realism by calling out both the formal and structural properties of a media text and understanding the production process. The engine-driven traces of the natural world continue to move toward greater fidelity and to a greater alignment between physiognomic and mechanical systems. Is the MetaHuman Creator an engine for diversity or simply a spectacle of control?
Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans
This production analysis, which draws from software studies and studies of visual culture, examines a tool that is fairly new to the arsenal of video game developer Epic Games—the in-development MetaHuman Creator that is part of the developer’s proprietary Unreal Engine—and poses the central question: Are the rapid prototyping and building tools of digital content delivering more diverse representations and narratives and supporting the free play of identity in playable media? The MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed application that lets content developers create high-fidelity digital characters without being steeped in the technical processes of character generation, rigging, animation and in-engine real-time functionality. Epic’s tool draws from a library of real scans of people and allows 3D content developers to quickly create unique photorealistic fully-rigged digital humans by mixing together different parts of real people while changing each character’s facial textures and geometries and updating the underlying rig. The tool allows visual artists to rapidly and seamlessly manipulate a character’s facial features, adjust skin complexion, and select from a range of preset body types. MetaHuman creation is a fluid of process, and the speedy transformation of character rigs and other non-binary attributes highlights the potential queerness or openness of data; yet commercial demonstrations and applications of the tool speed through a series of mutable subjects, and any assumed dynamism yields to stasis, to the construction of a functional and fixed character build of a certain physiognomic type.
The ongoing push toward (hyper)realism in commercial media has birthed a visual economy which is supported by an industrial apparatus that privileges mastery over the tools of production, and where bodies and politics are often cleaved in the design process. Epic’s multiethnic, multiracial, transgender MetaHuman Creator is a design tool and not a narrative engine. Its transitions are simple and seamless, and the traces of non-binary and non-white identities are simply part of a larger color palette. This paper argues that there is value in critical media praxis to interrogating realism by calling out both the formal and structural properties of a media text and understanding the production process. The engine-driven traces of the natural world continue to move toward greater fidelity and to a greater alignment between physiognomic and mechanical systems. Is the MetaHuman Creator an engine for diversity or simply a spectacle of control?
Bio
Dr. Eric Freedman is Professor and Dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture (Routledge, 2020) and Transient Images: Personal Media in Public Frameworks (Temple University Press, 2011). He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Creative Media Research and the advisory board of the Communication and Media Studies Research Network. Freedman holds a Ph.D. from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.