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Photorealistic Character Sample from Epic Games

Have a look at the realistic, comprehensive Unreal Engine 4 sample, showing the use of High-quality shader techniques.

It’s no secret that Epic Games has managed to make UE4 a perfect place for rendering very high-quality human characters, which look incredibly realistic. We’ve published a very nice breakdown of the skin shader done for the stylised character, but this week Epic actually released a nice realistic, comprehensive Unreal Engine 4 sample along with accompanying documentation to demonstrate the use of high-quality character shader techniques. The company is sharing the technology, which allowed it to build amazingly detailed characters in Paragon. 

For the past couple of years, Epic has been bringing new rendering features to UE4 that improves shading for skin, eyes, hair and other character attributes. To help the community get the most out of these features, we are releasing the Photorealistic Character sample, now available for use in any Unreal Engine 4 project, complete with documentation designed to guide developers through the creation process.

The purpose of sharing this content is to empower anyone to learn from, explore and deconstruct Epic’s professionally created materials and models. To get started with this showcase, open the Epic Games launcher and download the project from the Learn tab. When you open it, press Play In Editor to see a cinematic pan around the asset.

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The character is not modeled or sculpted, but rather scanned with the help of OTOY facial scanning.

If you go deep inside this documentation, you’ll learn more about the skin, hair and eye shading techniques, which allow to build realistic interactive characters. This is a great project for character artists, or anyone willing to invest some time in skin shaders.

Special thanks to Eugene d’Eon, Steve Marschner and Johannes Hanika for releasing their work The importance of sampling for physically-based hair fiber models , upon which some of the work of UE4’s hair shader is based.

If you forgot, this is how digital humans look in Paragon. Images are taken from here.

Pretty neat, right?

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