School of Computer Science and Statistics
This project aims to enhance the visual diversity and realism of crowds in real-time virtual environments by combining AI-driven texture generation for clothing with procedural variation techniques applied to a limited set of template MetaHumans in Unreal Engine. By leveraging state-of-the-art AI models to generate diverse, high-quality clothing textures dynamically, the project will create varied … Read more
[FYP] In this project, you will improve the realism of emotion on Metahumans in Unreal Engine by developing a realistic tear system, where tears are affected by gravity, and smudge in contact with make-up for added realism. Also part of the project will be motion capturing crying animations, and evaluating the resulting emotion with and … Read more
[FYP or MSc Level] This project will explore how lighting design, informed by cinematography and psychological theories, can be used to enhance emotional expressivity in characters and user immersion within a real-time VR open-world environment. The student will research emotional lighting techniques from film and psychology—such as color theory, contrast, and lighting direction—and apply them … Read more
[MSc level] Virtual assistants are becoming commonplace but the ability for them to gesture naturally and appropriately is still a huge research challenge (see image which shows a typical assistant displayed from the neck up, without gesturing arms and hands). In this project, you will develop a method to automatically learn structure from speech sequences … Read more
[FYP or MSc Level] This project will investigate clothing a virtual character using existing cloth plugins (e.g. uDraper or Marvelous Designer), and applying them to photorealistic Metahuman characters in UE5. Cloth simulation will then be tested using Chaos cloth or other, and student will create an embodiment system, where the user can embody a character … Read more
Metahuman characters [FYP] This project is about building an emotional conversational virtual agent in Unreal Engine that can take text as input and produce speech and associated animations on a Metahuman. The main aspect will be learning to work with virtual human animations and programming the to animate in state-machines. The project will involve integrating … Read more
CitizenMetaOne Youtuber live capture setup [FYP or MSc level] Become a virtual youtuber, and create your own live Metahuman system setup, using HTC Vive controllers for tracking the hands and a webcam for capturing the face. This project will use pre-existing animation plugins in Unreal Engine as a starting point (Faceware for the facial capture, … Read more
[MSc] In this project, you will first generate a database of cloth simulation for a single character performing a large range of motions, from a mocap database. You will use a commercial cloth simulation software to create the deformations (e.g., Houdini, Maya, UE4 cloth etc.). Then, the idea is to create a neural network that … Read more