Intro

How does one go about building a Metaverse? Well, it’s actually pretty … well, not straightforward. Lots of curves.

Let’s go step by step: for a perfect Metaverse, you will need:

• A Brand
• An Idea
• A bunch of folks, each specialized in their own field, converging together.
• Oh, and fix stuff on the fly.

The problems that I helped solve

We used Unreal’s Metahumans tech for this. Yet, Metahumans needed tattoos. And yes, we could tattoo each individual Metahuman, but upon close inspection, it became apparent that the Metahumans use the same shader. That means that we can tweak that shader to allow tattoos to be injected into the skin and make it procedural (color, pattern).

All we needed was a little pipeline, which went like this:

• A ZBrush template to design tattoos
• A dummy geometry to transfer the image data into a different UV projection
• A modified Metahuman shader

Here they are in action:

Groom & Hair

Well, in any decent project nowadays, diversity is the key. And that’s right and proper. The only snag in this is the lack of available high-quality assets in various digital stores. At that time, for example, we couldn’t find Afro hairstyles for Metahumans that the ART director would accept. Hence, I had to learn XGen literally on the fly, reading manuals while making it.

The result

The Metaverse

Live website here