(We used to call it 'indie game development.') Valve and Unity have been big players in making powerful development tools more accessible, too. That vision encompasses lots of different ideas, including stuff like crossplay, but part of the plan is to produce technology that allows more people to make more stuff-growing the 'creator economy,' in tech industry speak. MetaHuman Creator might be considered one aspect of Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's long term vision for a gaming 'metaverse,' a vision that just helped Epic pull in another $1 billion in funding. I had to briefly queue to get back in once, but not for more than a minute. Sessions are limited to one hour right now, but you can start a new session right after you get booted, and it automatically saves your work. I've been using it via Chrome, and it reacts very near instantly to my input. I hadn't used this kind of cloud-based software before, and I am reluctantly impressed. There are no requirements to register, but it did take me a day to get the email saying I could jump in. To use this early access release of MetaHuman Creator, you have to sign up on a registration page (opens in new tab). That license is quite permissive for small projects: You can use the Unreal development kit free, and if you publish a game made with it, you don't pay Epic any royalties until you've made at least $1 million in revenue. The one rule is that you can only publish characters you make with MetaHuman Creator in Unreal Engine (opens in new tab) projects, binding them to Epic's Unreal license. But 3D artists can export their MetaHuman characters and edit them in Autodesk Maya or other applications, making them as unique as they want, and then animate them by hand or with their own performance capture, using something like FaceWare (opens in new tab).

The limited hairstyle options and minimal hair customization will give away that a character was made with MetaHuman Creator, and I suspect after a while you might notice recurring nose and ear shapes and skin textures and so on.

Character creator 3 to unreal