Epic's MetaHuman toolset lets game developers create photorealistic digital human characters in minutes using machine learning — a process that once took months of manual work. It launched in February 2021 and has grown to include tools that animate faces from iPhone footage and simulate muscle and cloth movement in real time.

MetaHuman encompasses three machine learning components built into Unreal Engine. MetaHuman Creator uses learned models to generate fully rigged digital humans from presets or custom meshes. MetaHuman Animator (released with UE 5.2 in 2023) applies machine learning to iPhone facial-capture footage to produce accurate facial animation without manual keyframing. The ML Deformer (UE 5.0, 2022) trains a neural network on physics simulation data — muscles, flesh, cloth — so the engine can approximate complex, realistic movement in real time at a fraction of the usual processing cost. In February 2026, Epic acquired Meshcapade, a German spin-off from the Max Planck Institute, whose technology enables AI-generated body models and motion capture from ordinary video footage — eliminating the need for expensive motion-capture suits.