Realistic Real-Time Characters in Unreal

Lukas Hajka gave a little talk on the way he’s setting up realistic real-time characters in Unreal. 

I’m Lukas Hajka, a Slovakian 3D artist. I started doing CG 10 years ago, just messing with Maya and Euphoria Physics, right from the start I was drawn to the topic of digital humans: seemed like a compelling challenge and somehow it never left me.

In 2011 I started to explore photogrammetry and created the ‘Crossing the uncanny valley’ forum thread, which gained a decent amount of attention over the years and it subsequently landed me my first paid gigs to do digital characters after I was contacted by Remington Scott and John MacInnes. I worked on all sorts of characters for them. Grace and Trump for VR (to give proper credit, Grace was a collab with Salim Ljabli who did her body, and Trump was a collab with Salim Ljabli and Vimal Kerketta who worked on the likeness), that was 2016, the year I started to play with real-time characters in Unreal.

Later I worked on characters for Netflix Altered Carbon PR campaign which also won a Lumiere award for the best AR. The latest macinnesscott gig was an avatar of Gabriel Rene which is interestingly the first digital avatar on the blockchain. There’s more info on all these on their website.

Besides that, I worked with 3lateral on a bunch of characters for Battlefield 1 and Star Citizen and I have about 3-4 AAA feature films for the Chinese market under my belt. A problem with these AAA film and game productions is that it’s difficult to showcase my work afterwards, even after the project goes gold and is released. And that was actually my motivation for these latest real-time characters — to have something that represents the quality I can do and I can actually share it online freely without worrying about a flock of Chinese lawyers.

I reached out to james busby from 3dscanstore and he provided me with the photogrammetry photos and I did the eutow, heroine and worldstar projects, but I see them all as parts of a single project, worldstar being the poster child with most of the polish and that’s about it. 

I wanted to showcase the level of real-time characters that is totally achievable in today’s video games and other real-time media. It’s all up to specs with the characters that are being currently used in games, each head being under 6k polys with 8k maps. 

Lukas Hajka, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev