Enlarge / Would you believe that creating this performance took only minutes of video processing and no human tweaking? (credit: Ninja Theory / Epic )

SAN FRANCISCO—Every year at the Game Developers Conference, a handful of competing companies show off their latest motion-capture technology, which transforms human performances into 3D animations that can be used on in-game models. Usually, these technical demonstrations involve a lot of specialized hardware for the performance capture and a good deal of computer processing and manual artist tweaking to get the resulting data into a game-ready state.

Epic's upcoming MetaHuman facial animation tool looks set to revolutionize that kind of labor- and time-intensive workflow. In an impressive demonstration at Wednesday's State of Unreal stage presentation , Epic showed off the new machine-learning-powered system, which needed just a few minutes to generate impressively real, uncanny-valley-leaping facial animation from a simple head-on video taken on an iPhone.

The potential to get quick, high-end results from that kind of basic input "has literally changed how [testers] work or the kind of work they can take on," Epic VP of Digital Humans Technology Vladimir Mastilovic said in a panel discussion Wednesday afternoon.

Enlarge / Fortnite seen in the App Store on an iPhone on May 10, 2018. (credit: Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images )

In court documents that surfaced this weekend, Microsoft offered its support for Epic Games in the Unreal Engine-maker's quickly unfolding legal battle with Apple over access to the iOS app marketplace.

The legal declaration from Microsoft Gaming Developer Experiences General Manager Kevin Gammill comes in response to Apple's threat to halt Epic's access to software development tools used to update its popular Unreal Engine for use on iOS. That threat itself came after Epic tried to use its own payment system in the iOS version of Fortnite to get around Apple's 30 percent platform fee. That move quickly got the game pulled from the Apple App Store and led Epic to file a lawsuit in response.

Gammill says that any move harming development of Epic's Unreal Engine on iOS would hurt Microsoft's business, because "in Microsoft’s view there are very few other options available for creators to license with as many features and as much functionality as Unreal Engine across multiple platforms, including iOS."

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