Crafting stylized digital humans on ‘Daughter of the Inner Stars’

A small team behind the short film 'Daughter of the Inner Stars' shares how they used Unreal Engine 5 and MetaHuman to create stylized digital humans with performance capture. They customized MetaHuman assets in Blender—scaling up eye meshes and adding custom hair grooms and skin textures—to achieve a 2D illustration aesthetic. MetaHuman Animator provided high-quality facial capture data that was cleaned up directly in UE5, enabling real-time iteration without costly export/import cycles. UE5's Lumen, Nanite, and Quixel Megascans made sweeping cinematic shots feasible for a small team that couldn't afford traditional PBR render times.