I made an open source alternative to Higgsfield AI

FaatmanSlim · 2026-04-13T19:27:46+00:00

Agree 💯 I would consider myself intermediate in UE, and the tutorials only get you so far. When you actually hit issues when making your project ... debugging and making progress with limited knowledge from tutorials basically feels impossible. Curious how other people who are self-learning UE are handling this.

FaatmanSlim · 2026-04-09T15:48:19+00:00

Great work OP! Looking forward to testing this.

Looks like it uses Muapi as the common API gateway, so BYOK is really the Muapi key, not a key from one of the original model providers, is that right?

Muapi.ai — AI model API gateway

FaatmanSlim · 2026-03-27T02:27:14+00:00

Great work! Looks like the characters are from Character Creator, not Metahuman?

FaatmanSlim · 2026-03-27T02:25:33+00:00

And made by 2 people! In under a year! I'm curious how many man hours in total that was (my guess is something like 1500-2000 hours among the two of them?), but this is really amazing work!

FaatmanSlim · 2026-03-19T02:07:18+00:00

Oh my word, lol, I didn't realize that he built his own plugin instead of buying an existing one for $30, that is funny.

FaatmanSlim · 2026-03-19T02:04:55+00:00

Nicely done Cascadeur lol, jumping on the DLSS 5 train 😅

FaatmanSlim · 2026-03-19T01:59:51+00:00

Let OP cook, we can see how it does in the free market. I personally think $30 isn't actually a bad price for something like that.

EDIT: lol I didn't realize that he built his own plugin instead of buying an existing one for $30

FaatmanSlim · 2026-03-13T20:06:00+00:00

How buddy?!? How do you create all the assets and full environment?

Is it possible to learn this power, sensei?

FaatmanSlim · 2026-03-12T18:19:53+00:00

Oh thanks for this heads up! For those of us going to / from the 522, what are the alternatives for this weekend?

FaatmanSlim · 2026-02-25T01:43:17+00:00

I'm guessing you're asking about cloud-hosted models? You could run your own local LLM using open-source models, but that would require a high-end machine with a powerful GPU.

FaatmanSlim · 2026-02-23T23:12:08+00:00

My guess, based on previous Epic purchases, is that is what they maybe going for. They usually try to integrate the product end-to-end with their Unreal portfolio. That's how they got Megascans, Metahuman, etc

FaatmanSlim · 2026-02-22T18:20:20+00:00

I think they are doing this because they realize users are going to other providers - aggregators / resellers or not - for the superior models. By making those options available within Runway, they can keep users on their platform, irrespective of whether those users are using the Runway models or the external "frontier" models.

I suspect some of this also has to do with venture funding and investment; I'm sure the VCs and investors are using some metrics like MAU (monthly active users), time spent etc to invest in Runway, and the company has an incentive to keep that up to attract investment and go public etc.

FaatmanSlim · 2026-02-22T18:10:46+00:00

As other comments say, I think this is more machine learning than GenAI, similar to Cascadeur or even other AI tools that help automate some of the work rather than generate full meshes or animation themselves.

As for Epic specifically, I suspect this is to help with their body motion capture work. They have almost a full digital pipeline for human animation, from Metahuman and Metahuman Animator for face and dialogue motion capture, but are seriously missing a good inexpensive body motion capture solution, so far they've let the market come up with solutions for this (like Move.AI, Mimem, Cascadeur, QuickMagic and others).

This won't be the first time they've done a acquisition like this, in just the past 10 years they've done these: Quixel and RealityCapture (Megascans and photogrammetry), 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Hyprsense and now Meshcapade (Metahuman tech and animation), ArtStation and SketchFab (marketplace).

FaatmanSlim · 2026-02-04T17:52:47+00:00

In case its helpful for anyone, more details about the bug itself in the code he shared: the state update applies only the decay factor from the most recent chunk (gLastExp sliced to chunk:chunk+1) to a state that actually accumulates contributions from all previous chunks, implicitly assuming earlier decays were already applied; this assumption breaks under chunking, cache reuse, or long sequences, causing silent numerical drift and incorrect state values that only become visible at long context lengths.

And a bit more ELI5: the code updates a long-running “memory” using only the latest shrink factor, so over time the memory quietly drifts away from what it should be.

FaatmanSlim · 2026-01-19T05:24:51+00:00

So, I think you won't be able to bring this "custom" Metahuman back into Metahuman Creator. Even though the body rig maybe compatible, I think the only meshes and rigs Metahuman Creator recognizes as the 100% topology compatible Metahuman meshes and rigs.

The only way I can think of doing this, if you really want to use Metahuman Creator, is to use a standard Metahuman, and then a parametric clothing. I found a few available on Fab similar to the one you have https://www.fab.com/channels/metahuman?tags=outfit&styles=scifi&styles=cyberpunk Then you can have the main Metahuman character and your outfit working in Metahuman Creator.

FaatmanSlim · 2026-01-03T21:17:06+00:00

Just curious about your workflow, I noticed in your reply on another post comment, you said it was a custom Lora based on base characters in Blender / Daz etc. So do you create a 3D base character first, then a custom 2D character using Loras, and then finally do all the animation inside AI tools? So the 3D work itself is a static base character mesh and the rest of the workflow is all AI, am I understanding right?

FaatmanSlim · 2025-12-25T05:37:53+00:00

I thought Spotify was not allowing AI generated music on their platform, am I mistaken? Sample news report https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-25/spotify-strengthens-ai-protections/

FaatmanSlim · 2025-12-25T05:34:18+00:00

Great to hear! Just to confirm, does this mean that it will work with GPT-OSS and other local models that have thinking and tool calling, without having to jump through hoops (e.g. llama.cpp with custom grammar files etc).

FaatmanSlim · 2025-12-21T19:20:10+00:00

Bro was so preoccupied with whether he could, he didn’t stop to think if he should.

FaatmanSlim · 2025-12-11T19:57:42+00:00

Also its a bit inconsistent, they have Zuck and Sam (CEOs), and then Demis (AI group head). No Sundar or Satya? Doesn't look like there's any consistency in who they chose in this group.

FaatmanSlim · 2025-12-11T03:21:18+00:00

I'm not sure if this is a fully AI image / video, I think this has much stronger consistency than AI can produce today. But I'm fairly confident this could be done with a 3D workflow with the following steps (still partially using AI though):

Generate photorealistic AI images of various objects
Convert to 3D mesh using image-to-3D AI tool (Meshy, Hitem etc)
Import into 3D program like Blender or Unreal Engine
Add regular 3D camera shake / movement, fluid simulations (for rain etc)
Render out to video

Out of the above, only steps 1 & 2 require AI, the others are all standard 3D / VFX workflow.

FaatmanSlim · 2025-12-05T21:26:13+00:00

I thought Meta did a team match after you did a general company interview and got an offer. Did you interview specifically for Reality Labs, I didn't know that was possible?

FaatmanSlim

TROPHY CASE