RTC 360, Cyclone 3DR, and Unreal Engine / Creating MetaHuman model
Used hardware:
Preview:
Scanning myself with RTC360 and FIELD360
Import and clean the data in REGISTER 360
Registering and creating a mesh in Cyclone 3DR
Import the mesh to MetaHuman and edit it
Export MetaHuman model to Unreal Engine
In this tutorial, I'll show to you the full workflow of how to create a MetaHuman model with the RTC360 scanner. I chose the RTC360 as a sensor for scanning myself for different reasons:
Cause I have it and it was interesting for me is it possible or not
I tried to scan myself with a few mobile applications but doesn't get a nice result of head shape
Almost all mobile applications give you good texture quality, but the mesh is not so accurate
For getting really good results with photogrammetry you need some assistance, but I had a target to do it by myself without any help.
So I decided that for me will be the easiest way to use the RTC360 with a mobile application for remote control - FIELD360. I scanned myself at medium resolution in various head positions. I made about 5 setups and imported them to REGISTER 360. Actually, I think it's possible even with one scanner setup, but I decided to do more just in case. In the software, I deleted everything except my head and exported it to E57 by setups to have the ability to use that scans separately. Next, I imported all scans to Cyclone 3DR and stitched them together by manual transitions and the Best Fit command. For that, you need manually move and align all scans close to each other and then click the Best Fit tool. The first setup I chose as a reference and all others were automatically stitched to it as accurately as possible.
Note! With FIELD360 ver 4.0 and above you'll be able clean and export scans to E57 directly from your phone or tablet. So you could skip the step of importing and cleaning them in REGISTER 360, and do all the same right in Cyclone 3DR.
After aligning you should group all scans in a single point cloud and delete hairs and some noisy points, you could use Clean / Separate tools for that and the Noise filter tool. If you'll left your hair, then they'll be used for head shape extraction in Unreal, so you'll get a little bit bigger head than it is.
The next step is to create a single mesh from all clouds, which you could do in different ways, I chose the Create Mesh in two steps. This method is fast and provides you with pretty nice quality. For the first step this way you need to create a rough mesh and with the second step, it should be improved with refining tools. You could use the same settings as I did.
If you have some bad triangles in the hair and neck zone, just select them with the Clean / Separate tool, which is located on the Surface modeling toolbar, and click the Delete button.
After the creation of mesh is done we could be able to send it into Unreal for head shape extraction, but I recommend to you add a texture on your mesh before that. Because the Unreal detects eyes and mouth much better when your mesh has a texture. For that, I imported to the Cyclone 3DR just one picture with a front view of my face. Select it and go to Texturing / Estimate Pose tool. This function allows you to estimate the position and orientation of a picture coming from a camera. Give a point in the image view and its corresponding position in the 3D view to define point pairs. A computation is launched when 4 pairs have been defined (I advise you more than 7, especially when working out lens distortions). When all points will be done click Ok, select Oriented Image and face mesh, and click The Standard Texture button. You'll see that now your mesh got texture from photo image.
Now we got the realistic-looking face, let's export it to FBX format. But you should notice that Unreal could read this file with other measurement units, so before exporting resize your mesh in Cyclone 3DR with the Resize tool that is located on the transformation ribbon bar or change the Import Uniform Settings while importing the 3D model into the Unreal project.
To extract from your scan a head shape in the Unreal Engine you should have to do these steps:
Create a MetaHuman user account or use your Epic Games account
Run the Unreal Engine and create a new blank project. After it will be loaded go to the Edit menu and open the Plugin browser tab, search the Metahuman plugin and enable it. After that, your project will be restarted.
Now let's import our mesh to Unreal, go to Content Drawer (Ctrl + Space), click the right mouse button to the empty space and select Import from file asset to this folder, select your FBX file. In the Import options don't forget to change units if you didn't do it previously in the Cyclone 3DR. After import, you'll see in the Content Drawer menu all your materials. Next click again with the right mouse button to the empty space and select the menu - MetaHuman, choose Metahuman Identity, assign to it any name and open it with a double click. In the appeared window you need to do the below steps:
Add Components from Mesh and select there your FBX file
Adjust the camera position straight up your face
Select the Neutral Pose
Click + Promote Frame
Click Track Active Frame
After that, you should see the green lines and circles that contour your eyes and mouth. If you'll be not happy with the result, you could select them and adjust them as you want.
After all, corrections will be done click these buttons:
6. MetaHuman Identity Solve
7. Template Mesh
8. Switch to B view
And you'll see your MetaHuman template head.
Now our model is almost ready for editing on the MetaHuman site. All that you need to do is :
9. Select Body
10. Choose one of the templates and define the height
11. Publish by clicking Mesh to Metahuman
And wait until upload will be finished
Now go to https://metahuman.unrealengine.com/ login and you'll see that your model is uploaded. Click the Edit Selected button to start editing your model. Here you can add and adjust skin color, hair, eyes, teeth, cloth, height, weight, and much more. Also, you could edit the head shape and face elements if you are not so happy with the result. I used the PureRef software for placing my image as a reference on the screen and edit a little bit some shapes. At the end you could upload this model to Unreal Engine and then export it to use in other applications
If you still have a question or you want to repeat this tutorial by yourself, but don't have a valid license then you could reach me by clicking the below button.