Epic Games has just launched Unreal Engine 5.8 as the final major update to Unreal Engine 5 ahead of Unreal Engine 6, news that has sparked pretty mixed reactions across the community. This release introduces a range of significant new features, including Mesh Terrain, DMC, production-ready Mega Lights, Control Rig Dynamics, and more, which we'll explore in greater detail in the coming days.

The MetaHuman framework also received notable upgrades, with one of the most attention-grabbing being MetaHuman Collections, a new experimental asset type that allows you to fill your real-time world with crowds of MetaHumans, scaling up to "hundreds of characters on mobile and thousands on higher-end platforms".

It lets you define how your crowd looks by combining modular parts like heads, bodies, hair, and clothing. These can be assembled manually or generated procedurally using Blueprints. The workflow is built on the Mass system for managing large groups of characters. Where supported, rendering can take advantage of Nanite, and animation is handled either through Animation Blueprints or simpler animation sequences. To get started, download the MetaHuman Crowds Sample.

Mesh to MetaHuman is now fully built into MetaHuman Creator and no longer limited to just heads. You can feed it any mesh, no matter the topology, and it will generate a MetaHuman using the MetaHuman database behind the scenes. This makes it much easier to convert almost any character mesh into a fully rigged MetaHuman with proper topology in one go.

The workflow is focused on humanoid characters, but it can handle stylized designs quite well. A good example of this is the MetaHuman Vampire Character Asset.

MetaHuman Animator can now capture your entire performance: face, body, or both together, using just a single camera. Introduced as an experimental feature, this capability comes from integrating Meshcapade's technology and is provided through the MetaHuman Animator Markerless Motion Capture Plugin.

Finally, developers who want to bring MetaHuman-compatible capabilities to third-party applications now have access to core technologies, the RigLogic and DNA libraries, available on GitHub under an MIT license. The OpenRigLogic repository is said to be the first step toward the MetaHuman Devkit, a set of MetaHuman technologies that developers can integrate into their own pipelines and applications beyond Unreal Engine.

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