Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator

Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator
Author: Brian Rossney
Publisher: Packt Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2022-12-29
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1801819149

Discover the power of Unreal Engine 5 and the MetaHuman Creator in this illustrated guide to develop realistic digital characters, infusing them with full body and facial animation Key Features Create realistic characters using the MetaHuman Creator using a mixture of preset and custom tools Import your character into Unreal Engine 5 to access more editing options and begin animating it Combine face and body motion capturing to fully animate your digital humans Book DescriptionMetaHuman Creator (MHC) is an online, user-friendly 3D design tool for creating highly realistic digital humans that can be animated within Unreal Engine (UE) and enhanced with motion capture technology. This means that filmmakers and game developers now have access to a high quality, affordable solution that was previously only available to specialist studios. This book will focus on using UE5 and MHC from a filmmaker angle. Firstly, you’ll understand how to use the online MHC to create a digital character, changing its facial structure, body type, and clothing. After that, you’ll learn all the necessary steps to bring the character into UE5 and set it up for animation. Then, using an iPhone and a webcam to capture face and body movements, you’ll mix these motion capture files, refine the animations using the MetaHuman Control Rig, and save these takes to be reused and edited again within the Level Sequencer. On top of that, you’ll learn how to create a rendered video file for film production using both the Level Sequencer and a VR Cinematic Camera. By the end of this book, you’ll have created your own MetaHuman character, as well as face and body motion capture data, and learned the necessary skills to give your future projects further realism and creative control.What you will learn Create your own bespoke character using MHC Develop custom faces based on real people Utilize Blueprints to take control of your digital character Retarget animations using the Unreal Mannequin Use DeepMotion and Live Link for complete body and face animation Use the Control Rig to refine animations Export and render your character Who this book is for This book is for filmmakers and hobbyists who are planning to make a film using Unreal Engine for the first time, having worked in live action or purely digital media previously, either professionally or as a hobby. No experience with Unreal Engine is required, however it is useful to have some knowledge of 3D development applications and concepts like wireframes, skin weights, transform tools, and motion capture. It is recommended that you have access to an iPhone X (or a later model). Alternatively, you can use a free or paid version of Faceware, along with a basic webcam.

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine
Author: Brenden Sewell
Publisher: Packt Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1785285092

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine is a step-by-step approach to building a fully functional game, one system at a time. Starting with a basic First Person Shooter template, each chapter will extend the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You will progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to gradually more complex systems that will generate user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior. Focusing on universally applicable skills, the expertise you will develop in utilizing Blueprints can translate to other types of genres. By the time you finish the book, you will have a fully functional First Person Shooter game and the skills necessary to expand on the game to develop an entertaining, memorable experience for your players. From making customizations to player movement to creating new AI and game mechanics from scratch, you will discover everything you need to know to get started with game development using Blueprints and Unreal Engine 4.

Office Shock

Office Shock
Author: Bob Johansen
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1523003693

"A thoughtful, practical read about the future of the flexible office."—Adam Grant “Office shock” is an abrupt, unsettling change in where, when, how, and even why we work. In this visionary book, three prominent futurists argue that the office is both a place and a process—offices and officing—with a new range of choices, including what they call the emerging officeverse. To see the possibilities with fresh eyes, we must use future-back thinking to ask, What is the purpose of your officing? What are the outcomes—especially regarding climate—you want to achieve? With whom do you want to office? How will you augment your intelligence? Where and when will you office? How will you create an agile office? Traditional offices were often unfair, uncomfortable, uncreative, and unproductive. This book explores how to seize this great opportunity to transform office work.

Artificial Intelligence and Games

Artificial Intelligence and Games
Author: Georgios N. Yannakakis
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2018-02-17
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319635190

This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.

The Question Omnibus by Dennis O'Neil and Denys Cowan Vol. 1

The Question Omnibus by Dennis O'Neil and Denys Cowan Vol. 1
Author: Dennis O'Neil
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-06-28
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1779515472

Comics legends Dennis O’Neil and Denys Cowan reinvent DC’s faceless detective in this massive hardcover collection of the acclaimed 1980s series The Question! Just a few short years after co-creating Spider-Man, artist and writer Steve Ditko created the Question, who worked as an investigative journalist in public and a vigilante in secret. Two decades later, writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Denys Cowan unleashed their acclaimed reinvention of the Question for the late 1980s, coinciding with one of the most creatively thrilling periods in comics. While retaining familiar elements of the character—including his faceless mask—O’Neil and Cowan also imbued Vic Sage with a Zen philosophy and forced him to ask vital questions about his methods employed while fighting crime in the corrupt town of Hub City. But with deadly martial artist assassins and political intrigue to contend with, will one man—even a master of unarmed combat—be able to make a difference? This volume collects The Question #1-27, The Question Annual #1, Green Arrow Annual #1, andDetective Comics Annual #1.

Object-Oriented Feminism

Object-Oriented Feminism
Author: Katherine Behar
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1452952094

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses—like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism—that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.” Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an “object” in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinić, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL.

Museum Politics

Museum Politics
Author: Timothy W. Luke
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2002
Genre: Culture conflict
ISBN: 9781452906096

Lucifer Book One

Lucifer Book One
Author: Mike Carey
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-06-04
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1401240267

Cast out of Heaven, thrown down to rule in Hell, Lucifer Morningstar has resigned his post and abandoned his kingdom for the mortal city of Los Angles. Emerging from the pages of writer Neil Gaiman's award-winning series The Sandman, the former Lord of Hell is now enjoying a quiet retirement as the propretor of Lux, L.A.'s most elite piano bar. But now an assignment from the Creator Himself is going to change all that. If Lucifer agrees to do Heaven's dirty work, he can name his own price--but both the task and reward are more than they seem. Thrown into a position of great threat and ultimate opportunity, Lucifer knows that threading a path through this maze will require the harshest of sacrifices.

Aliens in Popular Culture

Aliens in Popular Culture
Author: Michael M. Levy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release:
Genre:
ISBN:

An indispensable resource, this book provides wide coverage on aliens in fiction and popular culture. The wide impact that the imagined alien has had upon Western culture has not been surveyed before; in many cases the essays in Aliens in Popular Culture are the first written on the topic. The book is a compendium of short entries on notable uses of aliens in popular culture across different media and platforms by almost 90 researchers in the field. It covers science fiction from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century, including books, films, television, comics, games, and even advertisements. Individual essays point to the ways in which the imagined alien can be seen as a reflection of different fears and tensions within society, above all in the Anglo-American world. The book additionally provides an overview for context and suggestions for further reading. All varieties of readers will find it to be a comprehensive reference about the extra-terrestrial in popular culture.

Signature Derrida

Signature Derrida
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226924556

Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with Critical Inquiry and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that Critical Inquiry encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida’s work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, Signature Derrida provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought. These essays define three significant “periods” in Derrida’s writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like “The Law of Genre,” in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida’s writing includes the essays “Of Spirit” and “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” and three eulogies to the intellectual legacies of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Lévinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories. With an introduction by Francoise Meltzer that provides an overview of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, Signature Derrida is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida’s work to date.