메타휴먼을 활용한 디지털 휴먼 제작 교육 프로그램 개발

Abstract

Recently, as the scope of use of digital contents has expanded, the demand for a digital human, a humanoid character, has increased. However, creating realistic virtual characters is much more difficult than creating ordinary virtual objects. Unreal Engine's MetaHuman, released in 2021, was developed to make it easy for anyone to create highly realistic humanoid characters. In this paper, we survey various technical elements of the virtual character production system. Among them, we focus on MetaHuman technology, a realistic digital human production system, and we examine the systemic characteristics and possibilities of MetaHuman. Afterwards we develop a new education program of digital human creation using MetaHuman and analyze the results that can be obtained when educating students through an actual curriculum. The students easily adapted to the new production environment of MetaHuman and created their own character to represent the school. After they set the personality in detail, they proceeded with an exterior design that reflected it. The main keywords derived by the students were ‘passion, courage, art, challenge, collaboration, creativity, communication, and technology’. Keywords such as ‘freedom, lively, subjective, unique, curious, fun and pleasant, attractive, young, well suited to red, dignified, modern woman, full of passion’ were also used. The gender of the virtual influencer representing the school is not biased to one side, and the male-to-female ratio is produced similarly. They created a unique virtual influencer rather than a pretty character. As the field of digital humans is expected to expand in line with the expansion of the Metaverse in the future, the concept and production ability of digital humans learned through this curriculum will be able to contribute to nurturing future talent.