Analog Devices, Inc. announced, during Unreal Fest 2024, industry-changing updates for developers seeking to build and distribute AI-enabled MetaHuman characters on Unreal Engine 5. New on-device plugins for NVIDIA ACE artifacts make integrating generative AI technologies more seamless, empowering creators to craft realistic digital humans on Windows PCs. According to the announcement, ACE is “a suite of digital human technologies that provide speech, intelligence, and animation powered by generative AI,” showing in the next generation of immersive, interactive character experiences beyond gaming.
Among the more prominent features in this latest release is the new Audio2Face-3D plug-in for Autodesk Maya, which makes creating facial animations for avatars faster and easier. This plugin provides an easy-to-use interface that is extendable from source code by developers for adaptability in various DCC tools. The plugin, the release said, “provides an intuitive, streamlined interface that will make creating avatars in Maya easier and faster.”
Meanwhile, an Unreal Engine 5 renderer microservice from NVIDIA employs Epic’s Unreal Pixel Streaming technology to further support both the NVIDIA ACE Animation Graph Microservice and operating systems in Linux for early access. This animation microservice “drives realistic and responsive character movements,” whereas the pixel streaming allows developers to push their MetaHuman Characters to an extensive range of devices and increase both the reach and engagement with audiences. This new technology enables high-fidelity character streaming to be more efficient and scalable in targeting “as many customers as possible.”
This release brings together the tools at a developer’s disposal in building complex, context-aware character interactions, featuring the NVIDIA ACE sample project and the Animation Graph microservice. As highlighted by NVIDIA, these new plugins are going to enable developers to “generate relevant responses at low latency” and drive the corresponding MetaHuman facial animations in Unreal Engine 5.
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