Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

Create custom 3D assets and bring them to life in Unreal Engine 5 using MetaHuman, Lumen, and Nanite

Henk Venter

Wilhelm Ogterop

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing

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First published: June 2022

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ISBN 978-1-80181-244-3

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I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother and father, Margaret and Daniel, who encouraged me to follow in my mother's footsteps to become a professional artist.

– Henk Venter

To my dad, Tiemen Ogterop, who was my rock of stability and always supported me unconditionally in any way he could. You had so much love to give. To my mum, who had fire in her belly and refused to give up during my childhood health problems. I owe you both the happy life I've had the privilege to experience. To my wife, June, and my daughter, Mila, who gave up some family time with her daddy so that he can teach others through this book. I love you to the end of time.

– Wilhelm Ogterop

Contributors

About the authors

Henk Venter is a senior 3D character artist with 22 years of experience in the 3D computer graphics industry. He is currently running his own 3D art production studio. He was the principal character artist at THQ Studio Australia and senior character artist at Electronic Arts in Montreal, Canada.

In the UK, he worked for Microsoft's Rare studio, Sumo Digital, and Eurocom . He has worked on multiple projects throughout his career, such as Army of Two, Crackdown 3, Batman Begins, Kinect Sports: Rivals, Battleship, Megamind: Ultimate Showdown, and Boogie, to name a few.

Wilhelm Ogterop has 24 years of experience in the 3D computer graphics industry and has worked as a character animator and lead animator for several UK and international game studios. Raven Software, Deep Silver, TT Fusion, Eurocom Entertainment, Instinct Games, Entrada Interactive, and Headfirst Productions are among the studios for which he has worked on-site and as a contractor.

Throughout his career, he has worked on a variety of interesting projects, including Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015), Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2015), Homefront: The Revolution (2016), Deadspace Extraction, Miscreated, The LEGO Movie Videogame, LEGO Legends of Chima, LEGO Lord of the Rings, LEGO City Undercover, Rio (Blue Sky Studios), GoldenEye 007, Vancouver 2010 (the official video game of the Olympic Winter Games), James Bond: Quantum of Solace, The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and other unpublished projects.

About the reviewer

Varun Kumar Gupta is a junior technical artist at Technicolor Creative Studios. He is an accomplished 3D generalist and programmer and enjoys using his skills to contribute to the exciting technological advances that happen every day at Technicolor. He likes to spend his time contributing to open source, procedural content generation, and computer graphics as much as possible. He also works as a freelancer, dealing in concept art, short films, and 2D art whenever time permits. He graduated from Bennett University in 2022 with a bachelor's degree in computer science engineering. In his free time, he likes to draw, learn music (guitar and piano), and play video games.