Epic Games’ MetaHuman creation tool launches out of early access

MetaHuman, a game dev tool from Epic Games to quickly create realistic digital human characters, is now out of early access and available to all developers with today’s release of Unreal Engine 5.6.

With the new update, developers can now use MetaHuman Animation to generate real-time animations and audio from almost any mono camera (such as webcams and most smartphones). Any camera that works with Unreal Engine LiveLink, including some Android phones, will be able to take advantage of these features.

MetaHuman Creator, meanwhile, now has an expanded assortment of character mesh shapes and textures, and enhanced fidelity thanks to improvements to the capturing and processing of scanned data. This will help teams create even more lifelike characters for their projects.

During the State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest 2025, Epic Games demonstrated a real-time demo of MetaHuman with an alien character named Blue. Using just a minimal camera setup, an actor backstage was able to speak to the crowd in real time, with MetaHuman accurately capturing his facial expressions and movements without any noticeable delays.

Epic also revealed that it updated the Unreal Engine EULA license to include MetaHumans, so now developers can use the tool in any game engine or creative software.

Disclosure: Epic Games paid my way to Unreal Fest.