metahumans

[prime temple]

@frosty remnant Hopefully, they will fix it soon.

[thin acorn]

@jovial rapids It worked perfectly !! thanks !!

[jovial rapids]

Great!Glad to see you solved!

[native spire]

Is anyone aware of a way to share Metahumans in Bridge?

Do you have to export from MHC and then send the other person that file? Realising now that exporting for Maya on a PC without Maya installed isn't going to work as a method for getting our MHs over to animators 😅

[prime temple]

At the moment, Quixel Bridge still has not yet fix

[frosty remnant]

It’s been fixed.

[prime temple]

@frosty remnant Yeah Finally. for how many days lol.

[primal juniper]

Hey, broad question. Are there any projects in the making using Metahumans in gameplay? If so, how performant are they with minimal ai (patrol attack)?

[waxen flume]

That's a good question, because when I use them in the editor, they are very resource hungry. I'm not sure if packaging them improves it.

[scarlet sleet]

Does anyone have a solution to my problem? Made a face live link animation but when I add to sequencer the animation isn't 100% accurate more like 50% so the eyelids wont blink fully and the expressions are mid

[hollow arch]

Theyre not too bad if u go hard with the settings

[hollow arch]

Try viewing the animation at different LODs. Many face bones are turned on and off depending on LOD.

[primal juniper]

For metahumans and similar solutions, another fear of mine is that all ue5 games will look the same haha. Its kinda hard making MH to bot feel MH. It is a great solution for things like the Metaverse (which Epic has been pushing for while, not sure if now though)

[scarlet sleet]

So i solved it but not really sure how just tweaking around with baking to control rig and anim blueprints. But finally solved it thanks for the fast response!

[hollow arch]

It takes work to make Metahumans work well. Not many will go through the gauntlet.

[wild knoll]

Looking to use Metahuman with no mocap, hand animating the rig in Maya. Does anyone have any experience with the exported body rig? Is it any good, and does it have give the same range of options a high-end game control rig would have?

[waxen flume]

you can't transfer rigs between any program. You can export the bones, blendshapes, skin weights, or other components. But the actual controls don't transfer.

[wild knoll]

I see - it seemed like others have managed to fit the metahuman rig onto more stylized meshes and animated it in Maya, by exporting it from Unreal

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/metahuman/downloading-and-exporting-metahumans/maya

It seems like it indeed only exports a facial control rig though, not a body rig after all. Perhaps that's done through a plugin.

[wintry terrace]

Wanna ask is it possible to create your own blendshapes for use in ARKit?

[cobalt saddle]

Yes ✨

[keen osprey]

Any easy way to add opacity to metahumans without modifying the core shader? Just a general overall opacity to entire metahuman would be great to have as shader is super complex, I'm not sure how it will behave with transparency in core shader.

[wintry terrace]

Is there an answer to this

[heady moat]

Good morning! If I turn a metahuman texture into a virtual texture, what problems does that cause? I'm of the mind that if its not enabled by default, then leave it alone. Whereas I've been given the counter point that VT has been around a long time and is specifically to use for situations where you have large textures, i.e. metahumans use 8k textures therefore we should turn it on for all metahuman textures and there's only upside. I'vee only seen it used for nanite and landscape textures, and trust Epic/3Lateral's techies would enable by default if this was going to be something the majority of users would need. Since their goal was to make this as performant as possible from mobile to HEDT.

[prime temple]

Yes, definitely, and make sure you have the same naming

[prime temple]

Yes, definitely, and make sure you have the same naming

[heady moat]

For posterity... with virtual textures for metahumans I noticed the face is black in a build and in the editor the face and skin texture is low quality. Metahuman textures can't be VirtualTexture it turns out, which the material editor verified for me with these glaring errors. Case closed. 🥂

[frosty remnant]

Hi, I have a conformal mesh which is giving me a headache. I'm used to edit and send back conformal meshes to MH identity with no problem but this one seems to have a problem. Do not know what's going on but here are a few exemples of what I see in UE

I have a feeling the problem here in another app might be related

You can see all faces seem sto be mixed up even though the UV map is right. Number of poly is untouched and is what should be for the conformal mesh.

Any idea ?

feels just like MH identity just do not know where to project the faces or vertices :/

[frosty remnant]

ok, no passionate debate nor answers but I have the cause of the problem : the vertex order index has been changed to the new mesh. It should match the vertex order of the original conformed mesh. So basically MHidentity is trying to stick vertex #1 with vertx #250 for example, hence the result

I found a plugin for a blender that's supposed to copy vertex order from uv and I'm currently testing this not to lose what's been done so far. Vertex index order copied from a working mesh. Checked if blendshapes worked ok in blender and tadaaa, everything's fixed... 😄 Hope this can help someone else !

[waxen flume]

Hello, the hair looks fine in editor, but beard comes out solid red in PIE. I'm using 5.4.2- any suggestions?

[neat meteor]

I was thinking of making a character in Metahuman, but if I want him rigged am I better off porting him to another program like Maya or Blender?

[vagrant dawn]

hi

I have created a MetaHuman with a tail. I rigged the tail's mesh in Autodesk Maya and attached the custom rig to the MetaHuman's body rig at the pelvis. Now, my question is, after adding the tail rig to the MetaHuman BP in Unreal, I added both the MetaHuman body controller and the custom tail controller in a level sequence. However, the body and tail controllers are not working together. Is there any solution for this?

[hollow arch]

I think they come rigged

[hollow arch]

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/AnimatingObjects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/WorkingwithModularCharacters/

[winter sphinx]

Hi, after moving to 5.4 a lot of my groom bindings cause the groom to disappear. It only happens with smaller grooms, like bangs or ponytails. Other full hairstyles and hair caps work. I have skin cache enabled in project settings.

[fossil geyser]

if i have a problem about using unreal engine and meta human should i post it here or is there a channel am missing for help related stuff?

[fossil geyser]

nvm got it

[rose saddle]

Hey all, I have some metahuman files another developer gave me and I want to import them into Unreal Engine. However, the tutorials I view all mention needing quixel bridge. From what I can tell quixel bridge is for creating metahumans?
Basically I’d like to know if there’s a way I can import the metahuman without quixel bridge.

[hollow arch]

You need bridge 2 search the local files

Or I'm sure you can just import it. Directly to your project

But that doesn't sound like a good option

[rose saddle]

Ok thank you

[river gull]

Hello

for some reason the hair of my metahuman is not being affected when tweaking the material. No parameter is doing any change. Why could that be happening?

[river gull]

Also any ways to optimize the hair? It already has lods, but is still too heavy. Nearly 8 mil points

[hollow arch]

Go to MH Blueprint > Select all Grooms > Details panel > [X] Use Cards

MH Hair cards at LOD 1 is a good balance for me

& to best use LODs, set a manual LOD Index for your grooms in the LOD Sync bp component

[turbid cape]

Hlo
Anyone know how can I fix eyelashes of character

[vital ice]

Have you got an alpha mask on their material?

[hard lance]

and is the material masked or translucent, with alpha mask

[turbid cape]

its working show normal in blender but after exporting in ue this happens

[hard lance]

double check the material settings in UE

[turbid cape]

where?

[hard lance]

so select the eye brow mesh, then go to details tab on the right, tuen scroll down to you see material, then double click on that, tuen can see the material with settings/nodes

[turbid cape]

actually there is not a different material for eye

body material have eye parts too

[hard lance]

hmmm, okay, so open that material then

as its one

[turbid cape]

ok after that wht i need to do

[hard lance]

so texture map, drag the alpha to opacity node

[turbid cape]

yeah that i check not working

[hard lance]

screen cap, please

[hard lance]

okay, so on the left, change the "blend mode" to "masked"
and with the alpha node, move it to "opacity mask" and it should work

[turbid cape]

alr

[turbid cape]

sorry still not working

[hard lance]

hmmmm, is there a separate alpha map by any chance?

also, did you click on apply?

[turbid cape]

nope

[turbid cape]

yep i applyed

[hard lance]

@turbid cape hmmm, and you sure their isn't a eyelash material/texture?

[turbid cape]

no

but there is mustache texture having same problem

[hard lance]

is that with the same settings we changed for the other one?

[hollow arch]

ensure: sky light is static
& directional lights cast deep shadows

[hidden scarab]

Hey guys, when I press the export button in PoseWrangler It does not export me my FBX only my json file? Any clue?

[turbid cape]

yeah i changed same settings on that

[hard lance]

hmmmm, so that might mean, the texture might not have alpha linked to texture map then

might need to make one

[turbid cape]

can u plz tell how to make alpha link?

[hard lance]

you need to use Photoshop, or gimp, to edit/make alpha map

[hidden scarab]

Anyone uses posesWrankler?

[native spire]

Hey folks. Just wondering whether anyone else has come across this. Teeth placement in the mouth seems to change between the raw Metahuman Animator resulting skeletal mesh (right) and the Metahuman Creator 'processed' version (left):

Hard to say which feels more natural, but there does seem to be a significant difference.

Is there a viable path to adjust teeth position within the mouth in-engine? Or is that going to be an export to Maya and make structural changes/DNA changes kind of situation...?

[turbid orchid]

hi! the metahumans can be used in gameplay? like, it's viable to have only one metahuman or two in gameplay? or it consume a lot of resources?

[hollow arch]

Should be decent.... At least set LOD settings component in Blueprint & click on all grooms and select Use Cards.

[turbid orchid]

okeyyy, thanks :)

anyone has a tutorial or something in how to add animations to the metahuman? I've never done it so I'm lost in how to start. like the idle, walking animations, etc

[hollow arch]

Youtube binge time

[turbid orchid]

jajjdj

[turbid orchid]

hi! anyone knows how can I fix this? because I thought of attaching it to the face, but then the 1st person camera would look weird, and I thought of just don't having the face in the metahuman, but then in the mirrors it would look very weird.

[modern sonnet]

How can i import the meta human without clothes ?
Like importing it with full body mesh in ue5.3.2

Its my first time working on meta human so this might be a beginner question 😅

[celest vessel]

Is the Groom Assets' Auto LOD Mode not working any more in 5.4?
It doesn't seem to do anything any more, still has the old LOD-steps

[neon bolt]

I have a hair/groom problem. My character has dark hair. I only use skylight, but blocking light with a black plane above my character to make better lighting scene. But the still hit the hair, only the hair. I think groom has problem with indirect light, right ?
I also have reddish eyelashes.
I tried a lot of things, follow unreal variables, deep shadow, etc etc. Do you have any ideas how to fix this ?

[vestal badger]

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• Body visual inspection through 7 levels: Face, Tops, Bottoms, Hands, Legs, Feet, Full Body
• Free character rotation or automatic rotation (ON/OFF) at runtime with adjustable rotation velocity in real-time.
• Slow-motion effect support while interacting with the character
• Zoom IN/OUT
• Infinite animation support
• Garments hide/show support
• Character POSE making and Take a Photo at any angle
  ++ Some use cases ++
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• Test your metaHuman clothing look and chaos physics simulation
  PS: Support any character other than metahuman
  *: with some limitations
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[shut plover]

UE crashes when I turn compile groom assets on metahuman (after turning visibility on)

[elder tree]

Heya, if you want to try the new great animations released in the Game Animation Sample with your own Metahuman, I've made a tutorial about it, you can check it out here!
https://youtu.be/jmLosvbFAK4

[hollow aurora]

Pretty sure I encountered this before but don't recall the solution. Simply applying a modified pose (straightened arms) animation sequence to my MH. But the arms become visibly distorted around the elbows. What causes this?

[hollow aurora]

Solution, Select Body in Blueprint Animation and enable Disable Post Process Blueprint

[neon spear]

Hi I am looking for a character Designer, is there anyone from india here ?

[vestal badger]

🔥 ~3 hours left! Last chance to grab MetaStudio at 70% OFF! June Sale ends today at 9:59 AM ET!
Re-create the experience of the metaHuman creator visualization tool within UE: Freely inspect your metahuman with ease using MetaStudio!*
MetaStudio is a powerful interactive real-time character presentation/visualization or inspection tool: use it as your character inspection/validation tool for your character creation workflow or to showcase your character to your team/clients or just your marketing tool to best showcase your character to future (ue) customers in an immersive lighting setup by using its interactive toolset such as :

•     Body visual inspection through 7 levels: Face, Tops, Bottoms, Hands, Legs, Feet, Full Body
  

•     Free character rotation or automatic rotation (ON/OFF) at runtime with adjustable rotation velocity in real-time.
  

•     Slow-motion effect support while interacting with the character
  

•     Zoom IN/OUT
  

•     Infinite animation support
  

•     Garments hide/show support
  

•     Character POSE making
  

•     Take a Photo at any angle
  

Some use cases:

•     Test your metaHuman lighting and look at many angles/levels
  

•     Test your metaHuman clothing look and chaos physics simulation
  

PS: Support any character other than metahuman
*: with some limitations
🔥 70% OFF! Grab it now before 9:59 AM ET Today 🔥
Showcase video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqk44BTc26g
UE marketplace link: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/3ec5f47be8614db3a7222413057a7687

[formal wind]

does anyone know why metahuman would do this? tried different lighting settings, adding to a new level, rendering, etc. nothing seem to resolve it

[rare whale]

Try disabling the Skin Cache Usage in the mesh.

[formal wind]

thank you. the issue was resolved by adding this r.SkinCache.RecomputeTangentsParallelDispatch 0. it probably does the same thing you suggested

[celest vessel]

Is the Groom Assets' Auto LOD Mode not working any more in Unreal 5.4?
It doesn't seem to do anything any more, still has the old LOD-steps

[keen osprey]

Is there any good source to find high quality metahuman animations? mainly facial animations.

[daring spire]

Hi, i'm trying to create a scene using path trace, but all my metahuman faces are deformed, any idea for this issue?

his faces are melting! but it only happens in the path tracer, when i use lumen everything works well

[rose saddle]

I posted a while back asking if anyone is interested in pre-made animations of facial expressions. I got some good feedback and wanted to share that it is available now!
The pack has 40 expressions ready to be applied to whatever metahuman you have created.

https://youtu.be/DKhMf8eJY-w?si=_EmpI4wPj4Cg46LR

[hollow arch]

Workaround, not solution.

[hollow arch]

Have u explored the default face anims? Shocked, smiling, angry, etc

[hollow arch]

Static skylight?

[hollow arch]

All metahumans come with a mesh titled "preview" which is entire body in 1 skel mesh without head.

[hollow arch]

Yep! The LOD settings in the Groom Asset may be overridden by the LOD Sync BP Component.

So turn on Mesh LOD Visualization & tweak advanced settings of the LOD Sync component and you can make gbe hair LOD scale however you like.

For example - I like having hair and body min LOD 1. And face min LOD 3.

[hollow aurora]

Yep agreed! It just hides the problem.

[hollow arch]

I see similar deformation when I change I. K settings during animation retargeting. That's all I have though

[formal wind]

does anyone know why metahumans become messed up after I record physics with take recorder? I'm trying to record ragdolls and it looks good in the viewport but when I open recorded take, the head disconnects from the body and hands are stretched

[manic glacier]

Is there a tutorial on the web side of metahuman pixel stream?

[hollow aurora]

How do I prevent my hair from changing (bear disappearing) on camera distance ? This is for a cinematic.

[hollow arch]

Lod sync

[silver sundial]

Has anyone done metahumans with bicycles?

[hollow arch]

Theoretically yes. Just retarget bicycle anim with IK intact

Ive done ik retargeting for metahumans with complex foot hand placement

And not live retargeting (joke)

[buoyant wren]

Do you think it's a good idea to use MetaHumans as a base to create characters like this?

[hollow arch]

No. If you want stylized/anime there are a few better options

Metahuman can be manually modified, but for this style, use daz or char creator

[lilac gazelle]

my legs dont work as in they are always in the same spot and how do i add a dodge/roll animation with a keybind

[naive marsh]

do they look similare if not how could i change it.Thank you

[limpid parcel]

Question,I have created a couple metahumans and they are saved and available in the browser version but when I launch Unreal Engine and open Bridge to import them into my Project,My metahumans are not available in bridge,how can I fix this???

[quasi hemlock]

main things that stand out at first glance

• Eyes are too far apart
• Lips at too tall
• Skin color is too yellow

[narrow shard]

Hello everyone
I'm 3d artist in sculpting and printing if character For Film, Animation and game development and game environment with 4 Years experience with expert team, I'm talented and skillful in modeling, rendering, printing, sculpting, and rigging. Also available for game characters, game environment, game assets

[prime ibex]

When I bake my Metahuman Control Rig animations to an Animation Sequence (for export into Marvellous Designer) there's a MASSIVE mismatch between the Control Rig pose and the Animation Sequence pose.

Can someone please help? This is a major headache for me and I have no clue if it's possible to fix.

[fast temple]

Maybe not the best idea because most people wouldn't know how to go about it so you'll have a heard time finding help if you get stuck, but if you're a professional character artist then go ahead it's totally possible, ive seen a number stylized metahumans that look absolutely amazing.

[native spire]

Hey folks. Just a question regarding grooms... Do we REALLY need to have a groom asset for every single head/body we're applying grooms to? This just feels like a nightmare in terms of organisation and asset management, especially for a game where you have potentially hundreds of heads for NPCs, etc.

The easiest method to solve this is to just only ever use one head skeletal mesh but have all of your NPC/character adjustments as blendshapes, but this isn't a perfect solution either, due to the separation away from the base face rig causing sync/mismatch issues in animation...

_ _
I could automate the process I suppose using the "CreateGroomAsset" function, but that would still mean basically having to iterate through every groom and every head in the project and spitting out a relevant binding asset, storing that in a way that the character can grab the binding asset for the appropriate groom asset (a data table I guess...) Seems really excessive...

[celest vessel]

even if I delete the LODSync Component, AutoLOD is not working :/

seems like they secretly removed the feature, even though the option is still there

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/groom-autolod-not-working-in-5-4/1903209

still nobody has replied to my question

[hollow arch]

And someone probably won't reply for some time. It's just how it works with the brand new release that no one wants to touch

And for the record, I suggested harnessing the lodzinc component, not deleting it

[celest vessel]

LOD Sync is great, but I think AutoLOD is the future. it's like Nanite for grooms, and it was working very well in 5.3 😄

the main problem with LOD steps is that you can clearly see them pop and you can clearly see the simulation start when coming close to the character. LODSync just changes the timing when it happens and makes all the hair's LODs pop at once. it's nice, but I was really having hope for Auto LOD ^^

[green lodge]

I may be late to the party, but select the body part of MH and check 'Disable post process blueprint'

And a question from me: wanted to see if anyone knows how to fix an issue where an alembic cloth from Marvelous glitches/intersects with the animated skeletal mesh (the animation/FPS are identical).

It only happens in singular frames, it'll go on correctly for a few seconds and then a tiny jump like this occurs - even though it's just one frame, it makes it hard to piece the animation together smoothly. Anyone?

Thank you for your time!

[native spire]

Has anyone attempted a replacement of the teeth/tongue geo with Metahuman? I find the quality of the teeth generally to be pretty poor but I really don't fancy the nightmare of departing from the metahuman geometry standard if it can be avoided. My thought was to potentially create a separate skeletal mesh for just the teeth/tongue and try to match the general weight painting of the originals. That way I can just hide the material section of the original teeth on the metahuman heads 😅

Basically contemplating replacing this little package 😄

[native spire]

Have you attempted replacing the teeth? There might be a way... Looking into which blendshapes need to be transfered at the moment.

I've ultimately narrowed it down to this mesh being the one that needs replacing. Two material slots (lacrimal and teeth materials) would need to be hidden on the original Metahuman head. I'm just not sure how tedious it would be to manually reconstruct the necessary range of shapekeys/weight painting onto a new mesh

Bothers me a lot that they didn't add the right number of teeth 😅

Not an impossibility:

[native spire]

Yep, quick test and it looks like so long as the mesh is imported back into Unreal with the same blendshapes you get a 1:1 match in animation. Exciting! Figured I'd share my journey in case it helps anyone else 😄

So the idea would be...

• Set original metahuman head's teeth material to a masked invisible material (or hide the sections completely)
• Create new teeth/tongue mesh and ensure it has all of the same blendshapes named the same way and as close to pose-matched as possible.
• Import as a skeletal mesh with a single bone as it's root matching the head bone's position on the metahuman rig, set leader pose, etc. as normal.

Only issue I could forsee happening is if you had loads of different heads you wanted to do this for, the teeth mesh size/position is not an exact science. You'd have to probably add additional blend shapes to the teeth mesh to 'adjust' it's size/shape for each head you want to use it for and enable that blend shape in the Anim BP based on whichever head mesh is used by the character. Not a huge problem, and honestly wouldn't take a huge amount of time if you can import the target head into the same DCC and move stuff around with proportional editing

[drifting juniper]

Hi Everyone, I imported a metahuman into the City Sample Project, and I'm having problems with shadows. it's all flackery and it happens randomly. I don't know if I'm being a major idiot or if something major is wrong but. Is anyone else having this issue? and if they are, is there a fix

I debated whether I should go to #lighting rather than metahuman, but this problem is only happens when I use metahumans.

[merry jacinth]

Anyone encountered this issue with grooming assets? I thought this is an issue with bounds in blueprint setup and set them to inherit parent, but it doesn't seem to help, I don't get why they disappear

[vernal bison]

guys im having a weird issue
so im have this male metahuman working perfect put when i switch the body and face with the female one the face wont work any ideas why?

[fickle drum]

I'm just trying to exporta metahuman

And there are definitely no plugins being installed by quixel bridge even though BRIDGE says it's installed. I don't see it in Maya plugin directory, or blender add ons. Do I download and install these separately?

My teacher downloaded it from quixel bridge OUTSIDE of unreal. and just trying to do it through the ame way

IGNORE

just the stupid download settings

sorry for taking up space

[hollow arch]

Set leader pose component

[vernal bison]

i have a set leader pose and that works with the male model and only the body of the female but not the head

[hollow arch]

The head is attached in the anim bp copy pose from mesh

Ensure identical BP component hierarchy as well

If that doesnt work im not sure. Look into modular character docs & test things from scratch again

[vernal bison]

i will give it a shot thanks \

[prime ibex]

Sorry for the late reply - I ended up doing that and it worked great :)

[drowsy olive]

Hey friends. I came across a weird error that I wanted to see if anyone has overcome before. I'm creating a metahuman from the animator, and am trying to record the poses (front,left,right) but when i open the metahuman identity module I get the following error/ message...

I'm running i9 -10980XE @3.00GHz with 128GB
I have the latest Nvidia Studio Driver
any info would be more than appreciated. TIA!!

[arctic estuary]

anyone in here noticed (at least in 5.4) that when importing a groom from an .abc file the cv-widths are not matching what is stored in the .abc file ? At least when exported as .abc from maya, tho the widths per strand values are ok in the file exported from maya)

[nocturne snow]

Made a short animation scene

[rose dock]

I'm experince the same issue. Are you using UE 5.4 as well?

[rose dock]

Maybe I'm late to the party! 😉

In such cases I have two solutions:

1. Set a higher collision distance for the specific panels in MD, so the distance between the skin and panel is at least 5mm+
2. Re-Texture the body parts of the Metahuman, and apply an opacitiy for the specific areas. Therefore the intersection is not visible.

[wide bridge]

Hello, I'm trying to export a character I bought from the unreal market as quads, but I couldn't succeed. Can you help me?

[prime ibex]

Open the skeletal mesh for the body and in one of the details panels, there's a drop down for post process blueprint. I set it to none.

[rose dock]

Thanks, that was the missing solution.

[prime ibex]

Once an asset is in unreal engine it will always be tris. You'll have to retopologize to quads outside of Unreal.

[hollow aurora]

Looking for ‘race driver’ attire. Can anyone offer suggestions?

[sudden solstice]

Has anyone been able to use groom texture generation and successfully use them on a static mesh? There is not much info about packed texture channels, naming seems a bit screwed up, but even with trial and error, tangents seems to be screwed up no matter what I try it looks off. Also, no idea what the follicule texture can be used for.

[icy ember]

Try to open the MetaHuman in your Unreal Engine project, navigate to the Content Browser, and locate your MetaHuman character. Double-click it to open the skeletal mesh in the Persona Editor.

[icy ember]

And find the Mesh Morpher in the Details panel on the right side, search for "Mesh Morpher" or navigate to the "Skeletal Mesh" section and look for "Mesh Morphers."

Sorry, was busy somehow before

[regal citrus]

Hey, i'm sure it's been asked, but it's hard to search for. Is it possible to replace metahuman parts with FBX meshes that are rigged the same and have the same morph targets but different topologies?

[regal citrus]

I've got a custom mesh loaded into unreal, but it's only being affected by the body control rig. I can't seem to get it to be arkit compatible, or let it be controlled by the facial control rig. It's got all the same bones and morph targets. I basically just exported the face as an fbx, without lods, threw it into blender, made some changes to the anatomy, deleted the eyelashes because they were in my way, and now I'm just trying to see if I can get it back into unreal to replace the head I started with.

[icy ember]

Maybe apply the Height Morpher, look for a morph target labelled "Height" or something similar. Drag the slider associated with this morpher to increase or decrease the character's height. Preview the adjustments in the viewport to see the effect.
Also adjust Proportions while adjusting height with the morpher, some proportions might appear off. Look for additional morph targets like "Leg Length" or "Torso Length" to fine-tune the look.

[regal citrus]

I'm getting an "imcompatible skeleton" error apparently.

[icy ember]

So the "incompatible skeleton" error you're encountering when trying to replace the head mesh with your custom mesh in Unreal Engine is a mismatch between the original head mesh's skeleton and your modified version. You can try this to troubleshoot and potentially fix the issue

You will open both meshes in Unreal Engine, compare the original head mesh, and your modified one in the Skeleton Editor. Ensure all bone names and their hierarchy are identical. Even a slight difference (e.g., missing a hyphen or capitalization) can cause the error. You will then check for hidden bones, Sometimes, hidden bones in the original mesh might be crucial for the control rig. Ensure they haven't been accidentally deleted or hidden in Blender.

I hope that should help

[regal citrus]

There's definitely some differences. Not sure where they are coming from, either from the blender export, or blender import. I'm going to take a bit of time to really nail this down.

[regal citrus]

Okay, so it looks like the skeleton is good. No names have been changed, all of the bones are there, but the bones in the face are still not getting controlled by the animations or control rigs.

One thing I've noticed, on my custom mesh, left, unused bones are given a bone icon, whereas on the default metahuman, they are dots. Not sure what the significance of this is. Lol

[regal citrus]

It's almost as if the control rig just isn't connecting to the armature

[icy ember]

Then export with Weights, and when exporting your modified mesh from Blender, make sure to export vertex weights. These weights define how each vertex is influenced by surrounding bones, ensuring proper deformation during animation

Then import with Skeleton, during the import process in Unreal Engine, select the original head mesh's skeleton as the reference for your custom mesh. This helps Unreal Engine map the custom mesh to the existing control rig system.

If unsuccessful, if the above steps don't work. You might need to rebuild the facial control rig for your custom mesh. This is a more advanced process involving binding the control rig to the custom skeleton and potentially adjusting weight maps. Consider searching online tutorials for "Unreal Engine Rebind Rig" for detailed instructions.

[regal citrus]

Vertex weights are being exported, actually. Here, I'll show you, one moment.

They are definitely there.

My weights are a bit wonky, but that's not a problem. I accidentally messed them up, but I didn't touch any of the bones at all.

[icy ember]

Ok, check for Plugin Compatibility if you're using plugins for the Control Rig or ARKit implementation, and ensure they are up-to-date and compatible with your Unreal Engine version.

Then, consult Documentation, refer to Unreal Engine's documentation on FBX importing and skeletal mesh setup for detailed instructions and troubleshooting tips.

[regal citrus]

I wonder if the issue could be that I'm using a different fbx format

[icy ember]

By carefully reviewing bone structure, re-exporting with weights, and importing with the correct reference skeleton, you should be able to get your custom head mesh working with the existing control rig and potentially achieve ARKit compatibility. If these steps don't resolve the issue, consider asking from someone for similar problems and solutions related to Unreal Engine, ARKit, and custom skeletal meshes.

[icy ember]

Might be, maybe

[regal citrus]

I'll try tomorrow. I'm done for the night

[icy ember]

Ok

[long spear]

someone has to know how to fix this. How do you a working metahuman animator livelink facial capture animation to work with a body animation?? I have both animations working, but can't attach head to the body

also the face animation keeps breaking, and I have to unmute and remute the facial control rig to get it working again

also the tutorials suggesting to blend poses in the animbp didn't work

[regal citrus]

So, I finally figured out a pretty good custom metahuman mesh workflow using blender and autodesk fbx converter.

[regal citrus]

What fixes have you tried?

[regal citrus]

Don't use mixamo on metahumans, firstly. You can get metahuman compatible animations on the unreal market. Also, check out the big motion samples project that was released. Works with metahumans and will literally give you everything you'll need for 3rd person character control, minus maybe attacks? I'm not sure.

[regal citrus]

*big lol

It's the main image when you open epic launcher.

[waxen flume]

A general FYI: Using Unreal Insights to analyze my game, the biggest frame drops come from metahumans NPCs and using a retargeted metahuman player character.

Basically, metahumans look nice but shouldn't be used in a game

[mortal wedge]

Is there a way to increase the resolution in the metahuman creator app? It's kinda low res

[buoyant stump]

Hello, I have a strange issue with reimporting metahuman face mesh back to UE. So I am using UE5.3.2 and I have my metahuman. I need to export the face mesh, make some changes (without changing the topology, I am modifying her ears a little) and import it back. I import the modified as a solo asset (not rewriting the original face mesh), I assign the correct skeleton and nothing works anymore. No animation, no control rig... nothing.

I tried several import options, this and that and so far no luck. Has anyone here have an experience with this? I am beggining to feel desperate 🙂 Thank you very much!

[buoyant stump]

OK, so after a while I did by setting up a source file for the original face mesh (always make a backup of course).

[hollow aurora]

Strange retargeting issue I haven't expereinced before. Getting a weird hip bulge after retargeting ActorCore animation to Metahuman.

[limpid parcel]

I have created my metahumans but when I open both stand alone and unreal bridge there are no metahumans available not even the presets HELP!!!! please 😦

[harsh dragon]

Hi is there anyone know about making groom(hair) collide with environment objects

[hollow aurora]

Looking for a race driver with helmet and suit, visor. Only 2 options in Marketplace. And one is only 4.27 compatible!
Doesn't necessarily have to be Metahuman based sionce will be not be used in CUs.
Will consider purchasing garment only if it is in APose.

[waxen flume]

Mixamo has a free one but it's simple

[hollow aurora]

Yeah a bit too simple. Going to aim instead for a good racing helmet with adjustable visor.

[hollow aurora]

Any suggestions for a good (less than $20) racing helmet? Like this but with an adjustable visor and maybe more detail.

[hollow aurora]

Doing some Dr Frankenstewin work on a UE5 manaquin skeletal mesh.
I've added my Metahuman head by cutting and pasting into a new Blueprint.
The problem now is that my head doesn't move when I animate the body.
I think this has something to do with the Socket?
Can anyone help?

[waxen flume]

It’s very complicated to get the head to move with the body if you change stuff on the head. All of the workarounds are on YouTube and none are simple. Regarding helmet, have you tried sketchfab?

[hollow aurora]

Yeah thanks. Simplest hack I found was to create a separate BP just for the MH head . Then parent this to your target body SKM in Outliner. Actually works quite well. And yes found a great helmet on cgtrader.

[hollow aurora]

Its all in the eyes! Can any Metahuman experts tell me how to get my eyelashes to move with my blink? I checked the bindings for the eyelash groom and it seems correct. Is this simply a limitation of Metahumans?

[gilded badger]

Anyone here created a new race without using price heavy tools? I‘d love to create something like a wolf/elven mix incl. fur. Not sure if that’s achievable with blender.

[regal citrus]

I'm actually making an addon for blender that will make this easier to do, it'll automatically adjust the rig to whatever changes you make to a mesh. It'll be great for tetargetting metahuman rigs from the base shape to something like a werewolf, so long as they have the same topology

I also hate how expensive the metahuman customizing tools are.

[regal citrus]

Looks like it works too, whoop whoop! Lmao

[mortal wedge]

Does anyone know how to properly export the epic skeleton, modify it in Blender, re-import it to UE, and use it for a Metahuman? Something is wrong here... 😆

[gilded badger]

Will you publish it for free or will you monetize it ?

[regal citrus]

I'm planning to monetize, but at various more affordable levels than the alternative tools

[gilded badger]

Alright hit me up when you do 👌🏽. Would love to start with my race

[regal citrus]

It shouldn't be long before I have an alpha available, might do a sale price during alpha as well. I just have a few functions i need to implement

[regal citrus]

One of the biggest elements I need to implement is metahuman DNA calibration. Without that, any models that have had their rigs changed, then reimported into unreal again will likely get all warpy like Hype's image there

[regal citrus]

I just implemented support for mesh deformations as well, so clothes and accessories designed to fit a base metahuman, can be refit to any custom metahuman so long as the topology is the same

[gloomy idol]

why dont metahumans have ik bones?

[regal citrus]

They do, you just need a rig set up to use them.

when you add one to a level sequence in unreal, an ik rig is created for you to animate with.

Anybody have any dnacalib experience? I'm having some issues that I'd love some help with.

    from dna import DataLayer_All, FileStream, Status, BinaryStreamReader, JSONStreamWriter
  File "C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.1\scripts\addons\Alchemesh\dnacalib\dna.py", line 12, in <module>
    import _py3dna
ImportError: DLL load failed while importing _py3dna: The specified module could not be found.```

Trying to figure out if the problem is that blender can't access the dlls or python extensions.

[silver brook]

check this addon https://discord.gg/PTGF5PAe metareforge

[regal citrus]

That looks pretty good. I'm making my addon a bit wider in scope, though. It automatically adjusts rigs to fit any change in a mesh's shape, but it will also deform objects, so clothes designed to fit one body type can be warped to fit any other body type with a single button click.

I managed to get it working for me though, after trial, and error, and manually changing the dnacalib files lol

[viral lark]

How to fix hair offset?
Make in blender.
Unreal Engine 5.4.3

[viral lark]

Fixed by import with Scale -1, 1, 1

[regal citrus]

It was mirrored?

[viral lark]

I don't know, maybe somewhere between Blender, the Alembic format and Unreal Engine there was a misunderstanding.

[hollow arch]

fyi this doesnt solve the problem

just kicks the can down the road.live retargeting is laughable

ok cool, have fun

[gloomy idol]

I may have found a solution but will try later. I have animations but the foot ik doesn't work properly

Some metahumans don't have the ik bones and some do it seems

Did my other messages get deleted?

[prime ibex]

When baking an animation (control rig) why does this happen on the first frame?

Even if I set all the little tweaker bones to skeleton, they still deform like this!!!

And then on the next frame?
Perfect. I'm so lost, this is so annoying

[regal citrus]

It only happens on the first frame?

[prime ibex]

Yep

And it's not there if I change the preview mesh to LOD1, looks like LOD1 doesnt have the problem bones active.

Seems like a bug with how control rig bakes

And I've spent a couple days researching this for a few hours each day

At this point I just think I need to have a donor frame at the start of my preroll that I can just discard in whatever software I'm going into, oh well

etc

[regal citrus]

That's probably what I'd do, or, take your whole animation and shift it right by one frame?

Left I mean

[mortal wedge]

Hey guys, when just clicking edit skeleton in the skeletal mesh editor and accepting, without doing any changes, it changes the shape of the Metahuman? This is in 5.4.3, is it a bug? It doesn't happen on other skeletal meshes, only on the Metahuman.
Thinner, longer neck? What leads to such a change? Scaling bones?

[simple forge]

how are you editing the skeleton?

[mortal wedge]

Within UE, open the skeletal mesh and click edit skeleton

[simple forge]

ah you are using the skeletal mesh editor?

[mortal wedge]

Yes

[simple forge]

I havent used that on MH before. I am wondering if a slightly different approach might be needed when using it on these specific assets. Would you mind sending a link to what resource you are using for applying this?

[mortal wedge]

I'm not following any resource, just thought I can do some changes like this, but it messes up the appearance unfortunately

[simple forge]

hmm I would check if there is any documentation or official epic resource on how to use this. If I had to guess as MH are a bit different from your typical ue character, there might be some extra work involved.

[mortal wedge]

yea, that's why I thought I'd ask here 😄

can't find anything else

[simple forge]

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/skeleton-editor-in-unreal-engine

https://youtu.be/miZFpMVYnB4?si=fnNGTKG_2mxjTI6T

[mortal wedge]

can't find anything there which is about Metahumans

[mortal wedge]

does anyone know how to fix this shading issue on the hair?

[simple forge]

do you have reflection captures in your scene?

[mortal wedge]

No

[simple forge]

I would turn off all the light sources and find out which one needs the settings adjusted or if the groom material needs to be adjusted

[hazy charm]

hello I´m new to metahuman. I worked on an own metahuman, but if I want to import it from quixel bridge to unreal engine my own character is not shown in the bridge browser. I already checked if quixel bridge is up to date and I´m signed in with the same account.

[mortal wedge]

Hmm, in this room for example there's no other light source than the sun from ultra dynamic sky. The glitch appears when moving around the camera

[simple forge]

do you have a post process volume? and is it set to Lumen for GI and RT for Reflections? You might want to select the light source and check on deep shadows.

[mortal wedge]

yes all three 🙂

[simple forge]

if you disable the UDSky and use a point light just for testing, does it still happen

[mortal wedge]

yea, it's still there, but in other places from other lights probably

[hollow arch]

Hello

When editing the skeleton in UE5

Sometimes it forces an LOD regeneration.

[hollow arch]

Set skylight to static & turn on Deep Shadows on directional light.

[hollow arch]

This operation of "opening and saving" skeletal editor in UE performs more operations than expected. It could be normalizing vertices or regenerating lods. Skeletal editor in UE5 is not reccomended, unless you NEED a more performant LOD0. This is because any editing forces a regeneration of LODs and the results cannot be improved beyond mediocre.
Instead, open the Skeletal Mesh LOD Settings & add bone names to Bone List. The engine will phase out bones (performance boost!) Without risking skeletal hierarchy incompatibility or LOD regeneration.

Metahumans come imported with their own LODs but they cannot be editing exclusively. I have not tried to export / import them as thats a can of man eating worms and time wasting I do not wish upon anyone.

[hollow arch]

And you will not unfortunately. We are out here in uncharted waters. Let me know if you have any other questions.

[mortal wedge]

Thanks, I can't find cast deep shadow in ultra dynamic sky, will ask in that Discord

[hollow arch]

Do they use a directional light conponent inside the BP

[mortal wedge]

yea, I believe so, but UDS has it's own settings. I can set skylight to static, but there's no deep shadow option

[hollow arch]

Good luck with that. What about if you select use cards on all grooms

[mortal wedge]

Uh oh, that looks good mate

seems to fix it

whatever it does 😄

any drawbacks?

[hollow arch]

Actually the opposite

You're a psycho if you use strands

Performance is better and it still looks amaaazing close up

Its step 1 whenever I import a metahuman

Unless youre doing some hyper realistic mo cap like some people around here 🤔

[mortal wedge]

ok cool

[mortal wedge]

May I ask another question? I'm having this weird glitch with the dress as well. When zooming out it glitches, when zooming closer it's fine. I'm not really sure how to start debugging this. It doesn't happen on the default Metahuman clothes

[hollow arch]

How did you skin the dress to the mesh

[mortal wedge]

with Metatailor, and then actually by using the skeletal mesh editor to delete the avatar which was in there as well.
now that you said that the editor might break it... that's maybe why

[hollow arch]

Yeah restart from the top but dont touch skel editor ever

Metatailor is kinda nice. I have plans to test it in the future. Super accessible.

[mortal wedge]

yea, it's fun, really easy and quick

[hollow arch]

FYI this skinning issue will most likely persist. I've seen other posts about this & it might be a difficulty niche. You can probably find other posts online about it.

[mortal wedge]

hmm okay, I've already asked in the Metatailor Discord, they said it's something related to LODs whatever, but weren't really precise. Sounded like they don't know yet

[hollow arch]

Its a skinning issue at least

Visualize skin weights in editor and you will seee

Might require some manual work when done in metatailor.

[pulsar tulip]

what would be the reason for me not having access to the 5.4 version? every tutorial i watch has it and i want to update my metahumans

[merry jacinth]

I'm using a Rokoko Headrig and setting up my new Metahuman identity. Getting this error, I never got it before. Anyone encountered this?

[tacit oak]

Hey, new to UE/Metahuman. I have a stylized character as a .fbx with textures (almost like Cel Shading) I want to preserve. I was initially interested in MH to quickly make facial animations but if I want to preserve the textures and UVs of my original character, would this workflow make sense? Are there other steps I need to take?

what I'm thinking is using the Metahuman Live Link to build face animations and then somehow overlay that onto my original mesh. Is that possible?

[cloud spoke]

can individuals ask for metahuman early access ?

[errant lark]

is there a way to migrate metahuman identity from 5.3 to 5.4 for example?? if i create a new project i don't know how to use face capture data without creating a new metahuman

[visual dew]

Some people use plugins like MetaPipe for Maya (or a Blender equivalent if such a thing even exists) to wrap the MetaHuman geo around the custom mesh. Sorta like a ShrinkWrap method. Then you need to bake the textures/materials from your custom asset over onto the UVs of the wrapped MetaHuman model. Some people have had good results but it's really quite a jank workflow. You'd also need to clean up the blendshapes in areas where the model doesn't deform correctly. It's not exactly the most production-ready method, but it does kinda work...

The alternative would be to take a list of the MetaHuman face's blendshapes and manually create them for your custom asset. Then hook that up to the MetaHuman facial rig in UE/Maya using the same method Epic do. Probably using Expressions or something. This way you are using 100% your own geometry, UVs and materials rather than shrinkwrapping a MetaHuman. You create blendshapes for it, and then are driving the blendshapes with the MH facial rig. But this is probably a more complicated method. Idk if all DCCs support it (MetaHuman only officially supports Maya, not Blender) and you'd need some good technical knowledge on both the inner workings of the facial rig, and knowledge on how to create Blendshapes. Which I don't really have myself so there's not much I can do to help in that area. 😅

But yeah... Facial rigging stuffs, complicated... 😔

To make it potentially easier... Whilst MetaHumans have quite a lot of Blendshapes, they also support the ARKit-based 52 blendshapes so that you can use more common facial mocap tools to drive the rig. So you could research how exactly to retarget ARKit data onto the MetaHuman facial rig. And if that works, you can just create the 52 ARKit blendshapes for your custom asset. But the facial performances will be more limited that way. There's really not an easy way around it though sadly.

[tacit oak]

More complicated than I thought! I’ll see what other options I have. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[hollow arch]

Just download it lol. There is no early access

[mortal wedge]

When importing back my Metahuman from Maya I have this neck seam here. I researched a bit and found some info that it could be related to vertex colors, but the vertex colors on my mesh are exactly the same as on the original. I messed around with fbx export import settings but can't make it happen. Any ideas?

[hollow arch]

does it show when you export the game to .exe? I know it's asking a lot to have you package it for the first time. But sometimes it

might be an in-editor graphic setting.
turn on wireframe view and manually toggle various LODs in case something is mis matched or your edges modified.
but you're also playing with fire re-importing a metahuman

[mortal wedge]

Dunno, you mean like packaging the whole project?
I „just“ did a small modification to the skeleton, so I’m ex- and importing the skeletal body mesh
I haven’t actually exported the lods, so they’re missing in my file.
Will have a look at that, thanks

[hollow arch]

No such thing as a small skeleton modification, in my amateur opinion.

I would recommend preserving the default MetaHuman LODs, as there is no way to get them back once gone. It's probably possible, but skeleton modification is not on my list of to-do. You can achieve removal of bones quite easily without breaking out of UE5.

May I ask, what modifications do you need.want?

[mortal wedge]

I’m adding breast bones

[hollow arch]

I wonder if you can add bones "on top" of the original skeleton, similar to the way the face adds bones on top of the body. Know what I mean?

I'll assume LODs are not required

[mortal wedge]

No, can’t follow

Nah, I won’t need lods

[hollow arch]

so look at the metahuman head/face skeleton tree

it has like 800 bones

body has like 300+

but the body bones still exist on the face/head, even though it doesnt use them

ehh i dont think the same modular setup would work.

as you'll probably want to weight vertices to the new bones you added

are the original pec bones not enough for your use-case?

[mortal wedge]

Yea exactly, did that as well in Maya

[hollow arch]

you can weight vertices in ue5, but its not as easy/accessible if you are a maya user

[mortal wedge]

From what I researched it looks like a normals, or vertex color issue, but so far I couldn’t find anything that’s off on my model

I know how to fix it in Blender, but Blender breaks the skeleton

[hollow arch]

Have you attempted to utilize these default corrective bones?

[mortal wedge]

No, I don’t know what these are doing

[hollow arch]

their original intent is post process animation

So when the metahuman moves their shoulder, the pec vertices move a little bit to make it more human and natural

But you may be able to apply logic to these clavicle/pec corrective bones to achieve your desired result

you can test the default vertex weights for these bones by opening ue skeletal mesh editor > select the bones & apply transform changes

post process animation blueprints can be tweaked/disabled if needed. You can simply go into the ABP_MetahumanName_PostProcess and drag wires around like a traditional blueprint.

I don't know how to create custom corrective/post process animations

but you might be able to disable post process node for clavicle/chest & apply your own animation logic to these bones. Or "layer" animation on top of this.

[mortal wedge]

Will check, thanks! Not at the computer right now

[hollow arch]

all good! I also found some leads by googling "metahuman jiggle physics"

Feel free to keep your use-case to yourself. But based on what i've seen, you should be able to figure something out. Good luck!

[cursive pilot]

Assuming that head and body are different meshes on Maya. Have you checked that vertex normals are pointing to the same direction ?
You can unlock and try a transfer attr on Maya beetween head and body border vertices .

[steady notch]

Hey folks, I'm having an issue related to enabling the Metahuman Plugin in a Custom Engine build, and trying to do an installer package version of the engine. Pretty niche use-case probably, but if anyone thinks they can help, here's my forum post: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/cannot-build-an-installer-package-of-custom-ue5-4-3-build-with-metahuman-plugin/1946609 (any help is appreciated, might be something simple I'm overlooking in the build process)

[mortal wedge]

Yea, I suspected that as well. As I didn't know how to do that in Maya I checked the normals in Blender and they look fine. Do you know how to check that in Maya? I'm just on the trial and quite a noob

that's the vertex normals of the original head and my body, looks ok to me?

[cursive pilot]

Select head mesh and then add body mesh to selection.
Go to Mesh --> Transfer Attributes and setup options as shown in image
Push Transfer and wait.

Then select all vertices on body mesh, remove the border selection and go to Mesh Display---> Unlock normals

Note: I see a gap in your image, for this to work, border vertices of head and body has to be at the same place in the world. (overlapped)

Why there is a gap between meshes ? Or just moved it for screenshot ?

[mortal wedge]

just moved for better views in screenshot

[cursive pilot]

gotcha, so if overlapped both are pointing to the same direction, should be ok.
Does the seam appears also in Maya or Blender or its just in unreal ?
Try exporting it without skeleton and drop it into a new UE scene to check

[mortal wedge]

Bah, feeling like a complete idiot in a software you don't know... 😄
When importing the facemesh everything rotates so the character lies on the floor for some reason?

[mortal wedge]

body is a static mesh now in UE, seam is also there

[cursive pilot]

Check Axis on preferences.

[mortal wedge]

if I import only head, it's fine, only body, fine.
but if I import head into a scene where the body already is it rotates

[cursive pilot]

As for this, try it with textures turned of. Just the mesh, maybe the problem relies on the diffuse of the texture and how it was textured.
If was not textured properly like using UDIMs or smth like that you will end up having a seam

[mortal wedge]

hmm, that's this then

but, it's exactly the same mesh, just exporting it from UE, importing to Maya, ex- and importing again seems to break something

[icy ember]

That sounds like an up-axis conversion problem.

What's the up-axis of the body-only file and of the head-only file?

[mortal wedge]

how do I check that? if I import both to Blender it's fine

[icy ember]

That's because Blender is doing the correct axis conversion somehow and Maya is not

[icy ember]

That's Maya's default, which is Y-up.

UE's default is Z-up.

If you're using Y-up in Maya, which is my current guess for your case, then Maya's FBX plugin is doing the conversion for you when you import the FBX files to the application.

[icy ember]

Windows/Settings and Preferences

[mortal wedge]

yea, it's Y

[icy ember]

Easy solution without having to dig too much into up axis conversions or the contents of your files is to just import to two separate Maya files and merge those two together. Maya won't mess around with any axis conversions if both are Maya files and both share the same up axis.

[icy ember]

Apparently Blender is Z-up, so no conversion needed.

[mortal wedge]

But in general the vertex normals should be the same in Maya as in Blender, right? So it's probably not my issue?

[icy ember]

Sorry, I was just focusing in the Up axis issue, completely missed the normals thing

[icy ember]

Ohhh!! You could just rotate it back -90 degrees in your root node x axis (if it’s the root joint, then use the joint orient x instead of the rotate x)

[icy ember]

I leave the normals issue to my good friend @cursive pilot 🤓

[mortal wedge]

Coming back to this, I had a look at the vertex normals in Maya. These are body and head vertex normals on the seam. Looks like they're off a tiny bit, right?

[wintry sorrel]

hello does anyone can explain why when "create component from footage" and select one of the imported slates the video appears black?

no frames at all..

[torn osprey]

Anybody have any tips to make metahumans more realistic? (to the point where you cant tell the difference between real and 3d)

[spice plaza]

Why I can no longer bake to the defualt face control rig AKA Face_ControlBoard_CtrlRig?
When I click bake to control rig only FK Control Rig and Simple face CtrlRig show up

[cursive pilot]

Yes ! Did you checked this ? ⬇️

[cursive pilot]

.

[mortal wedge]

Not yet, I have problems aligning everything in Maya. When importing the head everything flips 90 degrees. If I rotate it, skeleton doesn't rotate same angle... do you know how to fix this?

[cursive pilot]

Try to use fixed values.

If you import to Maya and then export from maya to Blender or UE. Does it rotates the same way? Or its jsut Maya having issues reading the file ?

[mortal wedge]

I changed world axis to Z up and now when I import both are fine, although I had to restart in between, weird

[mortal wedge]

I followed your description, but something is wrong, the border vertices are now pointing up

that's how they look after transferring

[icy ember]

Rotate the root joint only as described above @mortal wedge

[hollow arch]

Just wanted to share this nice Manny > Metahuman ik retargeting

[hollow arch]

😭 its garbage

I retargeted to Male Tall, and tried to use animation on Female Medium

yeah if i retarget, i cant simply use the animation on a different type of metahuman. its frustrating because i don't want to have to have a giant folder on animations per each metahuman grrrrr

back to plugin retargeting!

[hollow arch]

Ok forget that noise. Must do this the hard way. I will need to retarget all animations for each MetaHuman height. Weeeee! Another MetaHuman rabbit hole.

Anyone ever retarget animations with intent on using them for all MetaHuman sizes?

[mortal wedge]

Could this also result in problems with animation?
I'm still trying to figure out why my sequencer animations are precise, and then when playing them in the level, they are different.
I'm using live retargeting.
But, I did a test with the default SKM_Quinn, and even here I cannot place the hand precisely.
When playing the anim montage, it's slightly off... whhhhyyyy

[hollow arch]

The thumb issue is not related to animation retargeting. But instead, related to the difference between tall medium and short metahumans.

If you're having issues with hand placement, then that's just a classic case of retargeting, to something with a different height

[keen karma]

Hey, how to achieve high quality metahuman when render in UE? The quality does really good when i create within metahuman creator in web browser, when i import in unreal, looks like the quality texture its just flat.

This is what am talking about, the quality is really good when am creating. How to achieve 1:1 quality like in metahuman creator browser?

Is it just about lighting condition?

The skin was like this in unreal… like flat..,

[hollow arch]

My project this afternoon is to figure out best practice for figuring out scale difference IK retargeting. Based on what other professionals are saying on their paid marketplace assets, I'm gonna try creating multiple retargeters for each set of animations (crouched, standing, weapon types...) and then do this for each metahuman body height 😷

As far as annoying UE workarounds, this shouldnt be too bad. Im just heartbroken I cannot have 1 set of animations for every metahuman height. Only 3 different ones should be neccesary, as weight difference is handled by a different system (blend shapes or something Idk)

[hollow arch]

1. The online previewer is a completely different engine.
2. https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/scalability-reference-for-unreal-engine
3. Probably need to dive into shaders & lighting.

[simple forge]

I always use the female medium normal for retargeting as that is the base skeleton.

[hollow arch]

Thank you. Going to test to eliminate thumb issue. Pitch perfect IK retargeting will still require unique retargeters per MetaHuman. I'm hoping it only needs to be Tall/Med/Short. Maybe Fem & Male, depending on MetaHuman quirks or anim needs (fem locomotion & male locomotion)

[fathom galleon]

how can I get collisions with a static mesh?

[native spire]

Has anyone come across this with custom MH grooms? It's like the vertices of each strand get a threshold to to the nearest of a particular coordinate. Is this normal? The asset itself doesn't look this way in Blender.

Especially noticeable in motion

[native spire]

Hmm, another groom question. Anyone come across this before? The Groom seems to be applying onto the interior of the skin rather than the exterior...

Everything in Blender is set up just as all of my other grooms. Head normals are correct (not inverted for example), and the grooms themselves are pretty basic eyebrows.

Here is how it looks in Unreal, and then in Blender... I've exported many grooms from Blender without trouble before. Very strange...

Even more bizarrely, the binding is really solid, just totally reversed 😭

[hollow arch]

Did you modify the groom that came with the metahuman, or did you make your own groom from scratch?

[native spire]

Totally from scratch

[hollow arch]

Are you using the default metahuman groom binding asset?

[native spire]

I'm using one created for my groom using the head that I used to make the groom on 🙂

[hollow arch]

Might be data in the default mh binding asset of note idk

[hazy charm]

hello I´m new to metahuman. I worked on an own metahuman, but if I want to import it from quixel bridge to unreal engine my own character is not shown in the bridge browser. I already checked if quixel bridge is up to date and I´m signed in with the same account.

[prime ibex]

It's all lighting. I don't believe the metahuman creator is using a different engine.

[tired timber]

There is a sample project for metahumans. I haven't tried it myself, but it should give you a pretty good example on how they are supposed to be set up and lit. Maybe that helps.

[regal citrus]

So, the normals stored in a DNA file, are they supposed to be like, super smooth? The model I imported from the DNA, on the right, is REALLY smooth compared the the fbx of the same character exported from unreal. These both are the same models, just different normals.

Here it is compared to the mesh on the right having normal vectors reset:

[mellow summit]

Anyone else facing issues with hair of metahuman in raytracing, or anyone has any suggestions how to handle it, dont want to turn off ray tracing

[cloud spoke]

Guys, when I export Metahuman why don't I have the option, to export Source ZTool as an option?

[hollow arch]

try turning on Deep Shadows on your Directional Light & change your skylight to static.

[regal citrus]

I think that's only a download option, not an export option.

[native spire]

Managed to resolve this eyebrow issue. Sharing for anyone who might come across this issue in the future and is searching for what to do if hair is growing inside the mesh or the groom is appearing on the interior/flipped normals.

Basically the issue also persisted in Blender as well after I correctly attached the hair to the face mesh. It's more of a Blender thing than an Unreal thing, but figured I'd share it here anyway.

[mellow summit]

@hollow arch tried turning on deep shadows and there is no skylight in scene as it's indoor, but still as soon as the character walks the hairs start getting separated from mesh, it's just hair simulation system gets recreated mid rendering.

[hollow arch]

Set Use Cards [X] ON in your char bp groom details panel

[fathom galleon]

I'm trying to subdiv a MH hand and this is what happens to the uv mapping/ textures how can I properly subdiv the hand?

[fathom galleon]

anyone knows a way to subdivide MH? i only need more res for a WPO

[wild nimbus]

Hey guys, I'm using livelink with a metahuman, and I'm wondering how to know when livelink detects talking (in green in the interface) in the AnimBP ?

[vivid igloo]

Why I click track markers the frame went to all black and no green markers showed up

mesh to metahuman , this is the free camera , lit view

log goes directly end

[hollow arch]

Someone tell epic to approve my tutorial so everyone can start using it! 😎

[rich bone]

No idea. I would import a mesh into Maya, then duplicate, subdivide and transfer attributes of the imported UVs. In theory that is.

[hollow arch]

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2JVl/unreal-engine-metahuman-skeletal-mesh-optimization-guide

Metahuman optimization guide is finally LIVE

[fathom galleon]

ah i'll try transfering the uv.. not sure how to or why it breaks in the first place but that's worth a try.. i'm using blender however.. i'll try asking in blender discords I guess

thanks

[rustic plover]

anyone else having problems with packaking game when it includes metahumans and additional code in it? I have merged metahuman together with code, it works, until i try to package game. skeletelmeshparam or so systems breaks when packaking or rebooting.. it works and builds until i add some code like fall for character?

no problem with some other random character

[hollow arch]

Can we get an example of this code youre adding & the error output?

[celest oxide]

Sorry I Can't Help You Because I'm New In Unreal Engine 5

[rose dock]

Hi all, I'm facing an issue in regards to skinning weights. Basically I transferred the skinweights from the metahuman to my geo in houdini. As you can see it works completly fine in houdini but when I import it to Unreal and play back the same animation you see the intersection. How do you solve this?

[hollow arch]

I think the vertex normals are off

[rose dock]

I added vertex normals in Houdini, but unfortunatley it did not help 😦

[hollow arch]

@rose dock what mh skeletal mesh did you weight them to?

[rose dock]

I've tried the full body, exported from sequencer and the f_unw_tall body @hollow arch .

also Ive exported it with the original metahuman t-shirt and transfered the skinweights from there to my tee

thanks for your help @hollow arch , asking the question pushed me into the right direction. SOLUTION: Use the preview mesh of the Methuman.

[acoustic remnant]

Running into some problems with Groom after updating to 5.4

[2024.08.01-10.59.19:761][915]LogWindows: Error: Array index out of bounds: 8 into an array of size 8
[2024.08.01-10.59.19:761][915]LogWindows: Error: 
[2024.08.01-10.59.19:761][915]LogWindows: Error: 
[2024.08.01-10.59.19:761][915]LogWindows: Error: [Callstack] 0x00007ff8093070f1 UnrealEditor-HairStrandsCore.dll!AddHairStrandUpdateMeshTrianglesPass() 

Has anyone run into this, or know a fix? I've made a small change to the engine code but this shouldn't be a permanent fix

    for (const FCachedGeometry::Section& MeshSectionData : MeshLODData.Sections)
    {
        const uint32 SectionIndex = MeshSectionData.SectionIndex;
        
        if(!ensureMsgf(SectionDatas.IsValidIndex(SectionIndex), TEXT("Invalid section index %d"), SectionIndex))
        {
            UE_LOG(LogHairStrands, Error, TEXT("Invalid section index %d"), SectionIndex);
            continue;
        }

If the ensure is not there, it will crash

[hollow arch]

What is 8 into 8? The lod index? It should be 7 into 8 max.

Or try use cards instead of strands if applicable.

[acoustic remnant]

I know, this was confusing me all day

[acoustic remnant]

Unfortunately not up to me

[hollow arch]

Have you double checked your lod settings in the blueprint, groom asset, etc?

There are some project settings related to 16/32 bit indices which require enable & restart upon importing metahuman to a blank project. Maybe some flags got tripped up during the update of your project?

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/metahuman/downloading-and-exporting-metahumans/requirements-and-configuration-settings

Here is a list of such settings. Hope it helps.

[merry jacinth]

Have anyone had any success on creating Follicle or Strand texture for Grooms? I'm fairly confused that the documentation doesn't explain the specifics, but following these steps doesn't work.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/generating-groom-textures-in-unreal-engine

[random kindle]

Anyone seen an issue where the Capture Manager will connect to Live Link Face app (get the green light), but no takes show up for transfer? I get this in the console: "Failed to fetch the take metadata from the remote host. Note: Please ensure you are using compatible versions of LLF and UE". I'm using the latest IOS app and UE 5.4.

[merry jacinth]

I always send my takes to PC and then select them from local folder, never seen an issue, I wasn't aware there's remote configuration

[cerulean ice]

When trying to fit a groom to a different skeletal mesh, typically you would create a new groom binding asset and set a source and target skeletal meshes.

I’m trying to do this on 5.4.3 (also tried in 5.4.2) and as soon as I set a target and source skeletal mesh I get a message “building groom binding data” wich completes fine in a few seconds and right after that a new message “waiting for skinned assets to be ready” and Unreal freezes, with task manager showing no cpu usage.

I first encountered this problem when trying to fit metahuman grooms, but it is also happening with any skeletal meshes and groom, no matter how simple or complex they are.

It is working fine in 5.2 but can’t make it work on 5.4 even on a fresh engine install.

[hollow arch]

😂

[hollow arch]

(i have no clue how this happened)

[clear roost]

Hello everyone. Can anyone help me troubleshoot some issue with the metahuman plugin. I'm trying to create a metahuman ID to animate the face. But when I press prepare for performance this message apears

MetaHumanMeshTracker: Error: (VulkanDevice.cpp, l134): failed to find GPUs with Vulkan support
MetaHumanMeshTracker: Error: (FaceTrackingAPI.cpp, l178): failure to initialize: Critical error (VulkanDevice.cpp, l134): failed to find GPUs with Vulkan support

I cant find any blog that helps with this.

I'm working on a laptop with a 4080 GPU
Drivers have been updated, the unreal editor is set to run on this GPU

[hollow arch]

Are you using any GPU software? overclocking, monitoring, overlays

check settings in all GPU related software, control panel, device manager (can you disable integrated gpu?) test vulkan on a benchmark application

what card & what driver ver.

[clear roost]

Thanks At the moment just running UE. no overclocking, or any other stuff. (at least not consciously)
I'm avoiding to disable integrated GPU as this is the one that runs on the battery saving mode. That sometimes I use. But might be the only solution?
Can you recomend any vulkan benchmark app?
Card: Nvidia RTX 4080 (notebook)
Driver: game ready driver v560.81 Also tried with studio Driver (latest release)

Actually just disabled the igpu and got the same error

[stuck jackal]

Maybe somone here knows, is there a way to use a Metahuman head, with a different body (non-Metahuman) rig and still get the neck movement from the body rig?

I've currently parented it to the neck socket, but yeah....

[clear roost]

Just runed a benck mark that showed that my PC is running vulkan 1.3 so I guess the driver is there. It might be a problem with UE editor
https://www.gpumagick.com/scores/show.php?id=264213

[hollow arch]

reinstall unreal? xd

[hollow arch]

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/working-with-modular-characters-in-unreal-engine

in short, anim bp "copy pose from mesh" node

[visual dew]

I posted a bit of a breakdown of this in my Discord server, I'll see if i can find the link to the post and I'll send it here. Idk how performant it is at runtime or anything because I only make pre-rendered cinematic content, but the last time I ran a few tests, I got some pretty good results.

It's this one I think
https://discord.com/channels/811883477908717578/1261058049464991915

It's a bit of a lengthy read but it works for my needs. I can't guarantee it works for all cases but I haven't really had issues with it yet.

The TL;DR : is that you create an "inbetween" skeleton that copies the body's animation, and the metahuman head is attached to this one. This skeleton asset contains the bone hierarchies of both your custom body skeleton, as well as includes the bones of the metahuman body (root, hips, spines, neck bones and head, but not facial bones).

I typically create this merged skeleton asset in Maya because this way, I can line up the metahuman head with my body mesh more accurately to figure out where the neck bones need to be positioned. But you can probably also create it in Blender if you're more comfortable with it, and as of UE5.3 / 5.4, you can probably even create this skeleton asset directly in-engine using the Skeleton Editing tools.

Using an AnimBP, I can remap the animation from the body skeleton onto the MetaHuman head, scale the head down to fit the proportions better, etc. This method lets you attach the head to a custom body skeleton, even if it does not match the Unreal Engine skeleton naming convention. E.g in my guide, I am using a skeleton with the Maya HumanIK naming convention since that's what DICE used for Star Wars Battlefront 2 characters.

you do need to make this "binder" skeleton asset for each custom body skeleton. E.g you might have a MaleSkeleton, FemaleSkeleton, ChildSkeleton, RobotSkeleton, etc which have different proportions. But it's not really hard to do and you only make this asset one time and can reuse it across all characters that share the skeleton. So it works out for me.

[hollow aurora]

Has anyone successfully rendered a small animated metahuman crowd of say 10-20 people and overcome the performance bottlenecks to get real-time playback (24fps+). This is for virtual production.
If successful what was your optimization approach?

[hollow arch]

Easy
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2JVl/unreal-engine-metahuman-skeletal-mesh-optimization-guide

[hollow aurora]

Thanks!

[plucky kelp]

Anyone know how, using a custom metahuman I can setup the live link with like animbp etc??

[hollow arch]

Look at a default metahumans anim bp. There are livelink nodes you can reverse engineer.

[plucky kelp]

I copied everything over, I can only choose the live link variable options in the variable itself and it seems to only work when I click play

[worldly pebble]

Anybody got an idea why there's an SSS hole in my metahumans ears? It only happens with PT and enabled Subsurface scattering Profile as Blending mode.

[still arrow]

Anyone know best way to do metahum ?

I have exported it out of UE and into Blender with plan of simplyfying the bones etc as theres alot by default and well I don't know what bones I would do

[hollow arch]

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2JVl/unreal-engine-metahuman-skeletal-mesh-optimization-guide

Just add bone names to Bone List inside of LOD Settings Data Asset instead of deleting bones. More pain & no less gain.

[still arrow]

Anyone know if marvelous designer clothing can be used in ue to make like cloth kind of thing

Or would that not be possible

[hollow arch]

Yes but not literally inside

[still arrow]

?

[hollow arch]

You can export import from MD

[still arrow]

I know, were you reply to this ?

[still arrow]

this

if so, I was wondering can the clothing I make be used in UE as cloth kind of thing where its kind of dynamic rather then being strict animated and in the player model mesh ?

[hollow arch]

Yes, you can use marvelous designer to create physics cloth to use in UE

https://youtu.be/Nf6OUDoPCPs

[rapid tartan]

Everytime I spawn a metahuman they glitch like this for 0.1~0.2 secs and get back to normal, anyone had this problem too?

[hollow arch]

Your skin weights are bad @rapid tartan

Skeletal mesh vertices with no weighted bones automatically get weighted to root with the strength of (1, 1, 1). You can observe this in the skeletal mesh editor.

[rapid tartan]

Oh, I have no knowledge on this matter, I'm going to look into it. I'm using the metahumans without any modifications made

[fading nymph]

Anyone know why the default groom hair looks so plasticy? Left is the groom editor and looks correct, right is the viewport with it in use. All settings are default, just imported from bridge.

[hollow arch]

Strands ?

[opaque herald]

I'm retargeting animations to my Metahuman, all works except for crouching. Anyone experienced not being able to crouch with a metahuman?

[hollow arch]

Example?

Are you having bad IK retargeting results, or are you dealing with some root/pelvis bone issues?

[hollow arch]

Because IK retargeting doesnt work too well when applying 1 retargeter to many different anim sets

[opaque herald]

The overall results could be more precise when handling guns. Seems like the LiveRetargetMode introduces some delay from my source mannequin to the target MetaHuman. What seemed weird to me was just that everything was retargeted successfully except for the crouch state. Maybe it's a root/pelvis bone issue, though I'm not sure how to diagnose that 😕 I am only using one set of animations in my project, I haven't created duplicate animations which have been retargeted, I've just checked the 'UseLiveRetargetMode' Bool.

[fickle raptor]

Hi guys, I want to make a video where a MetaHuman's arm detaches. How can I do this? Thank u
i mean, in the sequencer, i want him to walk normaly, and in a moment, his arm detach, and fall to the ground

[opaque herald]

I remedied my issue by not using the LiveRetargetMode. Instead I added the missing Ik bones to my MetaHuman using Blender. Then I replaced my playable characters mesh with the MetaHumans.

Now I have an idle face animation sequence with some minor head movement I'd like to blend into the movement setup I have. I've used animation blueprints to set up my characters movement, and can see that I obviously can't use the same ABP for the face, as that is its own skeleton. Any tips on how I can incorporate my idle face anim sequence without detaching the head from the torso?

[cloud solstice]

is there an easy way to migrate one of those optimized metahumans in UEFN over to regular Unreal?

aside from exporting / recreating all the assets

[shut zodiac]

Are metahuman facial animations like any other animation in unreal? Eg. Anim sequence? Or are they specific file formats? I'm trying to understand how this works. Is there anywhere I can get an existing phrase or sentence as an animations for a metahuman to say? Just to test it?

[north heart]

Hey ya'll - I imported an actor's facial mocap and calibrated it/created a Metahuman Identity, and processed the animation with Metahuman Performance - and it looks great. However, when I export the animation (either as an animation asset or a level sequence) and apply it to a Metahuman that isn't the actor's Metahuman Identity, it looks terrible. The animation plays but it's very exaggerated and doesn't match how it looks in the actor's Indentity at all. Has anyone experienced this or know why it might be happening? Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[hollow arch]

to get great retargeting results, you must make them in editor

[dreamy gate]

How do I turn on the metahuman controllers? I imported directly from bridge my version is 5.4.3

[hollow arch]

Uefn metahumans are the exact same thing. See the Toggle Corrective Bones function of my guide for how to build the BP component in UE.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2JVl/unreal-engine-metahuman-skeletal-mesh-optimization-guide

[dreamy gate]

is there a site to download slates from professional actors?

[cloud solstice]

They are not the same. UEFN Metahumans are designed be used in UEFN worlds that have a 200mb memory limit, which a regular MetaHuman exceeds by a lot. Most notably they bake the textures in a different way that results in smaller textures sizes and less draw calls. You can see the differences explained in this talk. You can also check the Talisman demo in UEFN to see the differences for yourself. Nice guide though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygfgO2_WNm4

[hollow arch]

So they compressed the textures/materials a little bit or something? It's the same exact files from Bridge though.

I'll take a look at these material notes tomorrow and see if I can whip something up orbit turns out to be a massive dragon of a challenge.

Basically, the metahuman local files contain information exclusive to both platforms.

[cloud solstice]

More than a little bit. Average MetaHuman is 780mb and in the end they got it to be around 90mb for Fortnite.

Watch that lecture!

[hollow arch]

I did. Looks like they cooked the textures & played with grooms to achieve this.

A little bit, as in they didn't do a lot. Just a few things precisely.

[cloud solstice]

They also remade the materials.

Best I can see is exporting all the textures, recreating the materials by copying over the nodes, and copying over the groom settings.

And I know if I go through all that trouble they'll make it so you can download them for UE5.4 and I will have wasted my time lol

[hollow arch]

They admitted they converted the ue metahuman to the uefn one using only BP utility in engine. So its possible in ue?

Unless the eye face and body mats are from the ether

[cloud solstice]

Yeah they talked about making a commandlet, and showed a texture packing BP they made. I don't think any of that is released though.

[hollow arch]

Not sure why it wouldnt be. They told us exactly how they did it. I reverse engineered the bp component and expanded upon it. If I knew textures well I probably could do it.

The lossy compression setting alone reduces cooked textures by about 40%. Thats nice. Gotta test this and add to guide.

https://youtu.be/ygfgO2_WNm4?t=22m13s

At 22:13, he explains the texture baking process is an editor utility blueprint ran in a commandlet. In theory it can be done in ue.

[hollow arch]

This is some really mind blowing stuff.I'm gonna dive into this tomorrow.

[cloud solstice]

No doubt it can be done in UE, just need to release the tools or give us an option to download the UEFN version in Quixel Bridge.

[hollow arch]

what do you mean by release the tools? everything appeared available in ue5.4

im also struggling to fully understand his english in some sentences

[cloud solstice]

They showed some BP tools they used for the process, so if they'd release those so we can do it ourselves then that'd be nice.

[hollow arch]

What nodes arent available?

[cloud solstice]

Like nodes in the material graph that won't copy over?

[hollow arch]

Yeah whats the missing link specifically

[lavish roost]

hey im having some trouble with the quixel bridge app on my pc. every time i try to open it up it shows me this blank page and i can't do anything with it. I have a suspicion it might have been caused by having downloaded the same app on both my onedrive and the local drive but even when i deleted it on my onedrive the problem persists, any help would be appreciated!! i really don't want to keep having to download things from my laptop and then switch over to pc lol

[river gull]

Hi guys

how can I fix this groom issue?

[opaque herald]

Where in the Face_AnimBP would I place my looping facial animation? The tutorials I can find all show how to set it up for a static camera sequence but I am making a game, and am a bit confused as my character has a LocomotionStateMachine where I play all the bodily animations 🤔 Sorry for being dense 🥲 Y'all rock

[hollow arch]

Google this one, there are some temp files somewhere you need to modify.

[hollow arch]

Select sky light, set to static
Select directional light, enable Deep Shadows.
If those dont work, select grooms in the character BP and enable Use Cards.

[scenic forge]

Hey, how do I know which Skeletal mesh to use when importing a metahuman? There is one skeletal mesh with the character's name, but it seems it's just for the face. Also, why are my character's eyes black?

[soft fox]

Hey everyone!
I am facing this issue i have exported the cloth from marvelous designer and imported in UE but the body comes out of cloth in UE but in marvelous it fit proper i have metahumans body type which i use in marvelous to create cloth.(using latest version of both software)

Would appreciate urs help a lot.

[soft fox]

There will be a skeletal mesh named according to the body type ex. m_med_nrw

[scenic forge]

Thanks! I'll check that when I get home tonight.

[hollow arch]

Is the shirt being used as a modular character component? Set leader pose, etc

[scenic forge]

So it looks like the skeletal mesh got added during loading even thought he field was empty when importing. I guess I'll figure out if it's right when I try to animate it.

Still not sure why character's eyes are black though. Can I fix this after loading into Unreal, or is there something I need to do in the metahuman editor?

[scenic forge]

Okay, so the first character I loaded seemed to have a mesh added automatically, but it's named m_med_ovw_body.

I went to load a second character and after it imported it gave me an error message that it couldn't do something if a skeletal mesh wasn't selected (I didn't noet the exact wording). I thought it failed the import so went to import it again but this time it re-imported and didn't give me the error message.

So I tried to import a third character and this time I was going to select a skeletal mesh right in the import dialog. However the drop down lists skeletal meshes that are already loaded into the level and there are two copies of the one that was automatically added to my first character. How do I know which one belongs to this specific metahuman? There's ones named m_med_ovw_body and m_med_nrw_top_hoodie_nrm and several others.

[soft fox]

go in face's skeletal mesh in assset details below LOD 0's pannel turn off visible ray tracing in section 5 (eyeocclusion inst).

Shown in this image left side

[soft fox]

didn't get it actually i did this before at that time it was ok but after upgrading marvelous's and unreal's version facing this issue i might be wrong at something but dont know where! i add character and cloth's abc file in sequencer fram rate and all is ok.

[soft fox]

did't get what u r trying to say u can DM me after 9:00 pm at indian time zone will solve the issue.

[earnest lotus]

Hi,
I'm working on mesh to metahuman,
metahuman submenu isn't available in content browser "add " panel. Please help.
I vaguely remember on some video tutor types some command and proceeded. Not sure if it's for metahuman's, nor can I find the video to check.
Please help.

[autumn oasis]

Hi! Im using these cloth assets from an asset pack, and for some reason, on some parts it goes through the player. What should I do to solve this problem?

[hollow arch]

Sorry, not this familiar with marvelouz deziner

[hollow arch]

You need better skinning.

[soft fox]

install metahuman plugin to ur unreals version and turn on metahuman plugin in plugins.

[fossil mural]

Hi guys, a little help would be extremely helpful. I’m trying to make FaceTracking with quest3 into my metahuman using Meta Sample “Unreal-Movement” but I can’t find a way to make it work. I know that Meta used and IK_High_Fidelity_Rig (skeleton mesh) with Morph Targets included but in metahumans morph targets are in a face animation. So my guest was remapping the plugin names into the metahuman morph targets but with no luck. Also in AnimGraph I added a modify Curves with the metahuman curve names and adding them a Get expression value (from oculus XRFace Tracking) but also no luck. Zero facetraking movement so far.. I know quest3 only have mouth track by sound and that’s enough for me but I can’t make it work. Any help or guidance?

[scenic forge]

Unfortunately I'm just starting work at that time here in Canada. Basically, I just don't know which skeletal mesh to choose when importing a new Metahuman. I have this dialog and the skeletal mesh field is set to None. So I don't know which of the ones in the drop down to pick because they all seem to be ones that are already loaded into the engine for other objects. I don't know which one belongs to the Metahuman I'm trying to import.

[hollow arch]

Youre trying to import metahuman dna in this dialogue, not a metahuman skeletal mesh.

Its all so confusing to me

[simple forge]

depending on what you are doing, you can ignore that popup, otherwise this would be the face skeletal mesh of Steve

[scenic forge]

I have no idea what the DNA aspect is all about. This is just the import dialog when importing the metahuman. The mesh field is set to None. If I leave it like this and just import, I get this error message....So what is the DNA thing?

[scenic forge]

So, the DNA should be the face mesh?

[simple forge]

yes but i would honestly ignore that popup

it is ok if you get an error message unless you are literally importing a dna file

[scenic forge]

But what if I want to do facial animation? Can I still do it? What is teh DNA file for? Sorry, I've never done any animation before so I'm not sure what Metahumans give me to work with...

[simple forge]

it will sometimes show up if you have imported different versions of the same metahuman from bridge

you will have no issues animating, i ignore that popup, but i see it whenever ive imported a modified version of a metahuman i am using

metahuman dna is a file format that contains information about the actual face, and usually you will want to touch that aspect if you are using dna calibration to make updates to the face rig

[simple forge]

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/new-metahuman-release-brings-easier-sharing-and-dna-calibration this explains what you can do with the dna file if you wish to push the face rig further than what you can with the creator. If you are just doing normal workflows and not modifying the actual head rig, you are fine

[scenic forge]

No, I just want to be able to a few expressions. Won't even be doing lip syncing.

[simple forge]

then ignore the popup 😉

[scenic forge]

Excellent! Thank you!

[boreal ibex]

Why are my metahuman's animations completely breaking when i lower my View Distance scalability setting? It's fine on Epic but as you progressively lower the settings until the Low setting it just gets progressively cursed until on the lowest setting it is an unholy mound of twisted parts. This is fixed if i set my forced LOD to a really high LOD like LOD 5 in the LODSync component, but if i set it to lower LODs or even auto it breaks

[boreal ibex]

Apparently some bones are disappearing from the skeleton when i lower the view distance, causing them to not be animated anymore but still have an effect on the character because of its forced lod

i still don't know how to fix it

[brisk stone]

is there a good plugin/workflow for stylizing a meta human head in blender then taking it back to unreal?

[brisk stone]

also this is probably obv but would metahumand 5.4 work with 5.3? Im mostly interested in the optimizated game ready ones

im guessing its not though and i have to manually tweak stuff to make it optimized

[hollow arch]

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2JVl/unreal-engine-metahuman-skeletal-mesh-optimization-guide

[opaque herald]

UE Crashes every time I try to select a Base Pose Animation reference for my additive facial capture animation . Does anyone know why this might happen?
"Assertion failed: IsSet() [File:D:\build++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Public\Misc\Optional.h] [Line: 366] It is an error to call GetValue() on an unset TOptional. Please either check IsSet() or use Get(DefaultValue) instead."

[brisk stone]

thanks for the post!

[fossil mural]

Anyone can tell me how can we make mouth tracking work with quest3 in unreal-movement meta project with a metahuman instead of their characters? Really need help

[tidal jewel]

got a really weird problem with trying to add my meta humans to ue

I looked at a tutorial, broke, i want someone to explain to me why, it wont let me install quixel bridge plugin for 4.27 but installs for 5.03, this is a whole disaster, and its making my head spin

[simple forge]

what engine version are you trying to export to

[tidal jewel]

27

4.27*

[dire flame]

Greetings everyone, I hope you are doing well! I have an issue with a metahuman that I'm trying to solve, but so far, without success. I have attached a screenshot that explains the situation. What setup can solve this issue? UE5.3. Custom Metahuman.

[simple forge]

can you share a snapshot of your export settings?

[simple forge]

and what happens when you select install plugin?

[tidal jewel]

nothing, already installed

"installed"

doesnt really work

[simple forge]

do you have your UE project open when you export?

[tidal jewel]

yes, its not connected or installed to 27, i originally had 27 i realized it wont install for it so i went ahead and installed 5.0 and for some reason it worked for that

[simple forge]

It should look like this

[tidal jewel]

yeah i did that, it is installed but not according to it

i went as far as to look at plugin location to see why it kept reseting

[simple forge]

ok so try this, change the plugin location and manually set it so that it goes to the Megascans Library

[tidal jewel]

confused on the megascan thing, but i just know i put it directly into the plugins folder

[simple forge]

ok so look in your plugins folder, and locate the megascans plugin folder, direct it to that

[tidal jewel]

ok i just got off the phone with someone, i found the problem

[simple forge]

what was it

[tidal jewel]

i only got access to this, but from what he said, im bad at relaying information but

basically the way i got it was weird

[simple forge]

thats only for ue5 though, cause ue5 has an integrated bridge. If you are using 4.27 you can only export from bridge standalone

[tidal jewel]

at this point i think im going to let ersion 5.0 bully me

thank you but im tired and lazy, so thank you for trying to help

i said that twice

gn

[simple forge]

haha happens to the best of us

[cloud cradle]

Just wondering, is there a way to make the hair stick to the head without enabling global interpolation (RBF)?

[mortal wedge]

Hey guys, I modified the Metahuman physics asset (f_tal_nrw_body_Physics). Everything works fine when simulating in the physics asset, but none of these changes are reflected on my Metahuman character when walking around. What am I missing?

Physics type of the body is set to Simulated

[mortal wedge]

It works on another character, but not on a Metahuman. What am I missing? Do you need to activate something?

[nocturne snow]

Made a tutorial on mo capture for metahumans retaining neck rotation https://youtu.be/XvgN_c10b-s

[nimble condor]

Hey guys maybe someone of you can help me , i tried to import my own Meta Human into unreal engine and everything is working fine expect of the >Hair physics when im on the bike , ive already treid to disable the physics in the groom asset but it doesnt matter

How do I get the hair to stay on the character no matter how fast I go on the bike?

[hollow arch]

Increase the hair forced lod as high as it can go. Does it still happen?

[nimble condor]

Yes it still happen , it makes a visual difference but doesnt fix the problem

[hollow arch]

Wonder if its 1 frame late

Foe the binding

[nimble condor]

How can i see the frames of the hairs ?

or what do you mean with that

[soft fox]

Does anyone know how to reduce the size of a MetaHuman for UEFN?

[hollow arch]

What do you mean reduce the size? When you import a metahuman into UEFN, it enables all of the "special" uefn features.

[tidal jewel]

im on unreal engine 5 but it wont let me change this ersion

[simple forge]

you cannot export metahumans for ue5 from this bridge app, you have to use bridge that is integrated into ue5. You can use this version to download ue5 metahumans for use in maya

[tidal jewel]

oh

[icy ember]

I can work in many styles, like Semi-Realistic, Realistic, Cartoon, Anime, Low-Poly...

Furthermore, I have the ability to create Characters with a high level of detail.

Give me a concept art or reference that I can use, tell me where the model will be used, and what style you need.

[soft fox]

https://youtu.be/ygfgO2_WNm4?si=TBLIwW6XccT_MHEf

The above video says that by doing what they r telling the size of metahuman will be reduced from 2 gb to 60-70 mb.

[soft fox]

i want the metahuman in unreal only but want to reduce size of it but don't know the process.

[hollow arch]

I believe what they did in this explanation is. Reduce the actual the size of the asset Sitting in the folder.

[hollow arch]

Its already done

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/the-new-3-0-metahumans-40-performance-gains-tutorial-inside/1777726

.As long as you're using a 3.0 metahuman or greater, you're going to get the reduced asset file size, I believe

Regardless of fortnite

[soft fox]

ohk great,
You have written pretty much thanks man u have great knowledge.

[little fulcrum]

Try this https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/vertex-normal-rotation-alignment-tool-v1-0-maya-script

[mortal wedge]

O M F G, this actually worked. I can't believe it.

I have spent hours trying to fix this crappy seam. It's not 100% fixed, but a lot better.

[river gull]

is there another more realistic way to get photoscanned face onto a metahuman? The mesh to metahuman doesn't give very accurate results.

[visual dew]

You could look into solutions such as the paid plugin "Meta Pipe" for Maya, which still uses the MetaHuman mesh and topology but better conforms it to the source head mesh. You would maybe have to put work into cleaning up the blendshapes but I've seen people use the tool before to convert some really interesting meshes to the MetaHuman system, including non-humans like horses. There are possibly free/paid alternatives for other DDCs like Blender, but idk for sure. Sadly the Meta Pipe plugin is quite expensive so idk if it's within budget.

For converting your scan model's textures to the Metahuman mesh, IIRC there's a plugin called something like "KeenTools" for Blender which lets you bake textures over to the MetaHuman UV layout, or something like that. Or do the texture projection and rebaking process manually if you know how.

[little fulcrum]

I have replied to your post showing you my character with seam visibilty completely gone for non morph target meshes.

[mortal wedge]

Ah, you are YetiTech_Studios? I think there is something special with Metahumans.

Your script works fine, I can see in Maya that it perfectly adjusts the vertex normals.

My assumption is that the head border vertex normals of the mesh in Maya don't match the ones in Unreal.

But I'm failling to ex- and import the head, the setup of the head is quite complex...

[sand sigil]

anyone know why my hair looks like this (top) in Editor and on render ?

[brisk stone]

anyone know the best workflow to stylize a head and import it to unreal as a metahuman?

and getting the facial expressions correct as well

I only found maya videos on this

and blender videos just say:

make sure the topology is the same , which is a huge time taking task for me

nvrmind

[elfin kraken]

In UE5.3, does the feature where you can use your iPhone to map your facial expressions onto a MetaHuman only work on Windows or does it also work on Linux? Does it work on macOS too for that matter?

Also, in case it doesn't work natively on Linux, would it work via WINE?

[fringe zenith]

Hey guys. I have an issue with my Metahuman facial animation. The whole animation process was working just fine from calibration to final exported animation sequence. However, after repeating the process to use a different calibration video, the face is no longer animated, despite the head still moving.

I know it’s not the calibration video either because I tried the process again, twice, with different calibration video. The issue was the same and I can’t figure out what’s suddenly gone wrong

I can also see from the animation sequence here that the Metahuman ID is definitely animated and has animation curves

[simple forge]

did you train for performance on the second calibration video?

[fringe zenith]

Sorry, what do you mean by “train for performance”?

[simple forge]

so when you take your metahuman identity footage, the last step is to train for performance where it processes all the frames. You said you tried using a different calibration video, just wondering if you did the same for that one as well.

[fringe zenith]

Oh. Is that different from “Prepare Metahuman Performance” (or something like that)?

[simple forge]

yes sorry that is what i meant

[hollow arch]

Finding success with root motion is always satisfying.

[fringe zenith]

Yes I did. Still no luck 🙁

[brisk stone]

anyone use mesh morpher lite?

[summer lion]

Hi all. Just wondering what is the most affordable upgrade from just using your iPhone to capture facial performance for Metahuman Animator? And are those 'affordable' upgrades much of an improvement over using your phone?

[cloud cradle]

Is there a way to force sync load groom LOD? When I switch views, the LOD change pops-in for the first time as it loads the lod0.

[visual dew]

iirc you can open your MetaHuman Blueprint in the Content Browser, and in the Components panel at the bottom (under the meshes), there is a LOD Sync component in there. There's an option called "Force LOD" or something, and is set to -1 by default (which means it will use LODs properly). Just change the value to 0 to always force LOD 0. 🙂

[cloud cradle]

Hey thanks, unfortunately, this approach would make the strands mode always loaded, and they are kinda expensive memory and GPU time wise 😦
Was kinda hoping there was some way to flush the loading pipe for hairstrands. I guess I will have to do more digging

[brisk stone]

let us know if you find anything! as a tip, I know you can export blender hair objects to unreal nowadays

[hollow arch]

You can set min LOD to >=2 or set Use Cards in the groom component settings

[nimble condor]

Hey guys maybe someone of you can help me , i tried to import my own Meta Human into unreal engine and everything is working fine expect of the >Hair physics when im on the bike , ive already treid to disable the physics in the groom asset but it doesnt matter

I also asked the question here a week ago, but unfortunately I still haven't been able to solve the problem yet Maybe someone will make it now

things i have already tried :

Force LOD to 1 or higher
Disable Physics from Groom asset
I have also tried to simply remove the complete LOD setup from the character blurprint, but that doesn't help at all
In addition, I have really watched every youtube video that suggests a solution through

I'm getting really desperate

[hollow robin]

I have a modular character setup with morphs.

When some morphs are applied to the character I get a noticeable seam in the world normal channel where two modules connect.

Without any morphs there is no seam so I think the vertex normals on the base geometry are fine.

Is there any way to avoid these sorts of seams when applying morphs?

Thanks

[upbeat arrow]

Hi there, I'm facing an issue with a Mocap animation to Metahuman : 1 is the Mocap Anim, 2. an attempt to retarget and 3. the unrealistic result
EDIT : just be careful when using Retarget IK with the proper body_size!

Can anyone could give me some inputs to how manage to retarget properly?

[dim badger]

hi guys, i just exported metahuman face to the blender, and then reimported to unreal not changing any bones or arything, only adding 1 shape key and i get this error, does any one knows how to fix it?

[dim badger]

nvm fixed it

[devout steppe]

I cant login to metahuman/bridge when in Unreal. The whole login-window is messed up, even the button "sign in" says "signgngn" kinda.

[compact kernel]

I just wanted to check with this group, has anyone managed to fix head detachment outside of sequencer when running face animation and body animation at the same time? We have been delayed for months trying to solve this. All the youtubes focus on fixes for cinematic use via sequencer. Nothing for dialog gameplay, using animation montages during dialog.

I would be incredibly greatful for any knowledge shared, even willing to pay for a consultant if they know they can deliver.

Our voivce actors have worked so hard and to not be able to get their dialog into the game is pretty rough. Any insights appreciated. Example horror show attached.

[hollow arch]

The meta human head uses copy pose from mesh as its modular connection to the rest of the body. I'm guessing that the body A-posing during dialogue is preventing the head from connecting to the body. Play an animation on the body too and the head may connect to it.

[compact kernel]

Unfortunately that's not it.

[simple forge]

is the head movement coming from the body or the head? Should be on the body.

[compact kernel]

This is the cause. It's due to head neck transform information expecting to be controlled by a control rig but in dialog scenes there are none.

I researched this for months. On the export method I use to get our voice actor's performances into Engine:

In terms of Use Cases for the different types of Head Movement, typically if you are using a head-mounted iPhone or stereo HMC, you would not need or use the head movement from MHA, so would probably choose not to export it. If you are using a non head-mounted iPhone or stereo pair, the head movement results may be useful, and you would typically use ControlRig head movement.
How does this map onto the export options? Well for Animation Sequence export, if you tick the “Enable Head Movement” checkbox, then ControlRig head movement will be exported, otherwise, no head movement will be exported. For Level Sequence export, you can choose to export either, both or neither of the Transform Track or the ControlRig Track. It really depends on your Use Case.```


So it appears the problem is it's expecting a control rig to really correct this head movement and those are fine if you are doing sequencer. We're not.

But here is the actual full explanation from epic about the core issue we're having with narrative facial sequences playing via montage - at the 25 minute mark: https://youtu.be/Nkb4DEoZ_NY?t=1816

I checked in the Narrative Discord and this was the only solution they came up with also. 

https://youtu.be/OdUWl69hrN4?si=7wPiYeo03u7EGhxP

I could not figure out a way to use this information to use blendmasks to any effect that made it as seamless as the quite prolonged workflow described here. It is also one that assumes we have a body animation ready to go which in many cases for many scenes I was going to come back and do on a second pass later, so the only possible solution I've thought of that is even close to somewhat workable for one person to do (me while I process everyones lines) is to have only a couple "idle" or "good enough" placeholder body animations that i'll use this process on, set up a template and create animations that match for face and body for each characters lines. Total pain in the ass compared to the usual method of exporting sequences and requires much more knowledge of sequencer. 

So for whatever reason, Epic have just provided no simple way for us to do a workflow for dialogue with Narrative the way we want.

The other solution is the $5k mocap system I ordered so head and neck and body movement are captured at the same time as the facial performance.

But i don't want to always rely on the suit

[simple forge]

so as far as I know, copying the head movement keys from the facial animation and pasting them onto the body is the main approach currently. The head will detach if it has transform values regardless. As far as accuracy, the head movement will be accurate if you remove any head/neck curves from the body animation. The additive layer overrides the head/neck data so there might be some slight variation. If you want it identical, then remove all the head/neck curves from the body anim first.

[compact kernel]

Ok, I will try that today. I really appreciate that. It makes sense. If that works that really saves our project, because when you can let the full actor performance come through, you get so much more immmersive dialog.

[simple forge]

Yes the head curves will be identical when you copy and paste them onto the body performance. I personally find this very helpful when you want the eyeline to be consistent with the head movement.

[compact kernel]

Yeah the trick is that workflow isn't viable for an rpg's dialogue workload, not unless you can afford to doubkle down on manpower editing everything that will be near dialog

What the dev of the dialogue system and I are trying to explore is can you do something programmatically during dialolgue to remove any animation from neck01,02 and head

for the body animations

or rather completely replace it with whe same information from the face montage.

there seems like there has to be a way

so that way the player can run up, be in their normal locomotion idle unarmed or armed, and dialogue will just smoothly play along with whatever the body idle is doing.

We are only a small team, so we have to find a non-project killing method.

And yes, we are well aware we have been very ambitious and creating this problem for ourselves.

But hey after Baldur's gate who can work on an rpg and not strive for that...

[pallid kernel]

Same exact issue. Any tips to resolve?

[gilded badger]

Hey, I've the problem currently that the groom color seems to change depending on camera position - does someone can tell me where this comes from and how to fix? would be highly welcomed 🙂 Default color is black, but he seems to blonden when moving the camera to a different ngle

[gilded badger]

maybe better to visualize

[hollow arch]

A few things to try:

1. Enable Deep Shadows on directional lights
2. Set skylights to Static
3. Enable Use Cards on groom assets in character BP

[gilded badger]

Thanks for the reply, first two options haven't had any influence but the card seems to have set the color of the hair permanent, only downturn is it's actually light brown instead of black but I can live with that for now 😅

[hollow arch]

Are you using lumen?

[gilded badger]

jup

[hollow arch]

Well try turning that off 😅

[gilded badger]

One other wierd thing is the appearance in direct light vs indirect, you mabye have an idea on that? Face just looks off.

[gilded badger]

sec

[hollow arch]

Not sure how to define that sorry

[gilded badger]

Okay will do some research, thanks! Lumen doesn't change the outcome of the color, still light brown. But for now fine

[hollow arch]

Good luck! I know there's lots of questions about this specific topic online, so you might have luck.

[fluid oriole]

My latest project for the Marketplace, The Meta Customization System. Please let me know what you think.

[compact kernel]

Thank you for the suggestions. Fortunately we found a way to completely avoid any animation editing or cumbersome workflows and have fully interactive dialog with metahumans and not have to go anywhere near sequencer.

[opal swallow]

Hey guys! I've been struggling with this issue with my metahumans in UE5 and I'm not sure what's going on or how to fix it. The playback shows the arms and legs deforming and glitching. I'm not sure if this is a user error or a metahuman error. Any help would be appreciated!

[soft fox]

Can anyone please help me I have created cloth in marvelous designer and in marvelous designer i have imported metahuman body type got from one tutorials from youtube in which body and head mesh are combined, after simulating i export alembic file to unreal and add it in sequencer but the body comes out of cloth but in MD it looks proper.

[fluid oriole]

A look at the in-engine facial customization feature of Meta Customization System (2x speed)

[pale zealot]

when exporting the MH to marvelous, you need to check that the post process anim blueprint is also applied to the exported body mesh, otherwise the mesh you are exporting is just the body without the extra correctives. (other thing you can do is just disable the post process anim blueprint on the body mesh)

[soft fox]

did that too but it is not working anymore i had tried and it worked before but now i think metahumans are updated thats why.

[harsh terrace]

Might be a little late. But have you tried setting 'LOD Sync' in the MH BP from '-1' to '0'?

[keen karma]

Hey Wanted to ask a question... Does metahuman can control over breast size? or i need to customized it manually?

[harsh terrace]

Not sure if this is the right channel but it's definitely Metahuman related 🙂 I'm working with Chaos Cloth Assets. When changing anything in my BP, UE jumps into 'Evaluating nodes...' for 3-5min. Why would that be?

[hollow arch]

Not by default but there are examples online & character creator plugins that enable this.

[covert lava]

Bought a used Iphone 12 to play with metahuman animator, the one I got seems like a completely fine used phone but the depth sensor seems messed up at the bottom left and top right in live link. Very uncool.

Also Unreal kept telling me my face is 1.3x bigger than the average metahuman face, effectively cyberbullying me

[covert lava]

this is what it looked like. The artifacts at bottom left and top right were always present and flickering

[prime ibex]

@simple forge just saw your new video, really great work. How do you actually make those adjustments? Is it corrective blendshapes or something different?

[simple forge]

Thank you so much! This made my day 😉

I made those adjustments by baking the animation to the face control rig. And then I manually adjust the curves for each control by using the reference footage side by side in sequencer. I go over the workflow I use for adjusting animations using the faceboard in the metahuman animator tutorial series on UEs Youtube.

Here is what the curves look like before and after. You can see those drops which is where the brows raise. For some reason the brow raise affects these controls so I have to go back and readjust them

[prime ibex]

I do watch your videos when they pop up! Ah nice, so it's a manual offset? I'm curious, assuming there is a correlation in the relationship, have you tried automating this in an animation blueprint? (Ftr I haven't really touched animation blueprints yet, so I don't know if driving the value this way would be possible.)

[simple forge]

that is a really good question about the correlation and relationship. I have found some of these "offsets" do indeed have a number of frames they start to break at, but because this brow raise causes so many offsets that shouldnt occur, for example they also cause the eyes to tilt down during intense brow raises, I think it is more related to Rig Logic and the correctives perhaps trying to overcompensate. Not really sure.

[prime ibex]

Hm, ok. So it sounds like it might be a fairly complex blueprint to create with a bunch of caveats, but possible. I wonder if the built in machine learning toolset in ue could be used. No clue. But it sounds like as long as there's some kind of mapping function it could work well.

Have you used corrective blendshapes before? I haven't, but I know they are needed to achieve a high degree of likeness, but the process is a bit of a black box. I think it might involve round trip from MH, into the Maya metapipe plugin to create and assign them correctly but no clue.

[hollow aurora]

Any Metahuman LOD experts? Puzzled why, in a cinematic, as my camera zooms to CU the LODs on two groom elements (mustache, eyebrows) switches, even though my LOD Bias on all grooms is set to 0 and my LODSync is forcing LOD 0 as well.
Why are my groom LODs still switching?

Ok so a possible solution. I think you need to set LOD Bias on the individual Groom components to -1. Can anyone confirm?

[flat flint]

I heard MH for UEFEN was more optimized, can you use thme for non UEFE projects yet?

[hollow arch]

Whats up

[hollow arch]

There are blueprint nodes inside of the Anim BP Post Process that manually alter their LOD behavior. Try deleting it? Might work.

[autumn oasis]

Hi! How can I replace my metahumans face mesh with the sculpted face mesh I exported from blender?

[hollow arch]

Mesh to Metahuman might do the trick?

It takes a static mesh & slaps it on.

[autumn oasis]

Sorry, forgot to delete the message, I've already figured it out. Thanks tho

[hollow arch]

Woot. Care to share solution?

I'll take the red pill, please.

[autumn oasis]

I followed the steps here: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/modifying-face-mesh-post-export/262593/2

"Emayan" s solution

[hollow arch]

Is the neck seam intact?

[autumn oasis]

What do you mean?

The face mesh and body mesh are seperate

[hollow arch]

Sometimes when using external DCC to edit MetaHumam head, the body+head seam no longer is perfect.

There are Maya scripts and other solutions commonly discussed for this annoyance.

[autumn oasis]

I had no such problem

[native spire]

Yep, modifying in external DCCs works 😛

These blendshapes/morphs were done in Blender

They'll never animate quite as well as the original shape, but honestly for our purposes I've found using one head mesh and many shapekeys for variety/randomisation has worked really well.

[simple forge]

this is really cool

[native spire]

Thank you! So much work but it's finally starting to pay off. Eyebrows and hair next 😄

[umbral fable]

In the dark parts the hair shines, can anyone help me?

[hollow arch]

Try setting directional light to Deep Shadows on & set skylight to static.

[umbral fable]

nop ...

[hollow arch]

Lumen?

You may need to turn strands off

Set use cards on in groom bp component

[tardy forum]

Is there any way to get the Metahuman base head mesh, before any morphs are applied to it?

The "Hadley" face seems to be the most neutral.

[hollow arch]

I dont think there is a default default

[willow ivy]

Hello all!

I built a picker and animation tool for the Metahuman Face Control Rig - it allows you to select and animate any Metahuman Face Control Rig from the picker directly, using the WASD keys. This widget has really helped speed up my workflow, and I hope it does the same for you.

Short video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4qp6ZAnks

Gumroad link to download: https://locodrome.gumroad.com/l/Metahuman_Face_ControlRig_Picker

Installation instructions are in the Gumroad content page, as are tips on usage and troubleshooting. It's all pretty simple and straightforward. Do let me know what you think - I will try and incorporate feedback and feature suggestions whenever I can. And if you find it useful, do please spread the word to anyone else that might find it useful too.

[pallid kernel]

Hi, I'm just another victim to GPU crashing, but mine is specific to anytime I open Metahuman Identity with DX12. So hopefully someone in this Metahumans channel was able to resolve a similar issue at some point and can lend me a helping hand. I posted my issues and steps taken in more detail in the UE forum here: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/metahuman-identity-gpu-crashed-or-d3d-device-removed-check-log-for-gpu-state-information/2027524
Cheers & Thanks in advance 🙏

[river gull]

Hi, hair reflections are going crazy. Any fixes for this?

[hoary wadi]

if your modifying Edge loops for MH best to follow this 🙂

[split drift]

Hey folks, is it possible to generate a metahuman asset (facial/body rigs) from an existing character? I have a complete character model with its own body rig and different topology from metahuman templates, but no facial rig hence I would like to give it a metahuman facial rig, is there a workflow for that?

Because what I have seen so far is the generator workflow from basemesh, but I already have a basemesh I would like to use

[simple forge]

this is really cool

[river gull]

anyone? :S

[hollow arch]

Strands

Select use cards in the groom bp component settings

Are you using Lumen?

[hollow aurora]

In animation mode how do you remove all the white connecting lines and squares in the viewport?

Anyone use this Mixamo-Metahuman retargeter? Useful? Worth the price? Or does the new retargeter in 5.4 make this redundant?
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/mixamo-animation-retargeting-2

[cursive garnet]

I'm new to blender and have a few quick questions. I'm trying to use Metahumans as a base mesh to then sculpt to customize them. I'm running into an issue where there's seams in my meta humans head. How do I fix this?

Also, what would be the best way to optimize metahumans for gameplay? I'm trying to make two different "versions" of my character models. One for cinematics and one for gameplay. The gameplay models don't need teeth, facial rigging, or to be so highly detailed. What would be the best way to lower the poly count of the mesh and and remove all of the needless facial rigging/armeture? The more performant I can make the meshes the better, while preserving some of the photorealism.

[nimble condor]

Hey Guys ive give my Meta human Clothing and there is a clothing offset when im try to live retarget the character

is this a weightpaint problem ?

[hollow arch]

I purchased this a while back, but I don't need it anymore thanks to the new retargeter.

[hollow arch]

If its painted you need to follow the Modular Character docs for UE

If not, paint it or use MetaTailor

[hollow arch]

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2JVl/unreal-engine-metahuman-skeletal-mesh-optimization-guide

[nimble condor]

its not painted i think ive only export it from marvelous designer into blender and then into the unreal engine

so i need to weightpaint the clothing first in blender ?

[hollow arch]

Yes. You can use UE 5.3, Blender, Maya, MetaTailor, etc

[river gull]

Cards fixes it, but the hair looks worse. And yeah I use lumen

[hollow arch]

Might be Lumen? Strands just dont reflect light correctly compared to similar geometry primitives.

Maybe material gurus could solve it, not sure. Strands too expensive for most use cases, so I never researched it.

[hollow aurora]

Are there any Metahuman experts that have managed to get Mass AI working?
Following this 2 yr old tutorial but I think too many things have changed from 5.1 to 5.4.
Is anyone aware of a more recent walk thru or tutorial?
https://youtu.be/bVvYn7dEqMA?si=VDlXATZyeaPzvjPX

[nimble condor]

So ive tried now Metatailor it is much much better to get clothes on the Meta human in combination with marvelous designer

the problem is still there but it is better

[hollow arch]

It's not perfect, but it's the best way to just slap some clothes on a Metahuman

[hollow arch]

Ur bp might not be setup right. Did you add the new clothes to a set leader pose node?

[nimble condor]

No i didnt change in anything in the eventgraph if you mean this ?

[opaque dirge]

i'm doing skeletal mesh merging to simplify metahumans but running into a strange ... issue

anyone know how to fix that?

[hollow arch]

Yes. You need to drag your custom clothes into the character blueprint and daisy chain it the logic related to "copy pose from mesh"

[hollow arch]

I've done it before based on the docs, but the only issues I had was with the normal maps & textures. Never seen this issue. Try from scratch again on a default MH.

[fair narwhal]

Mixamo Animation Retarget - Drooping Shoulders on Metahuman:

Using UE 5.4 and retargeted Mixamo animation, and carefully selecting the correct SKMs - but every way I try this I end up with the shoulders of my Metahuman "drooping".

See this video I created to demonstrate: vimeo.com/1011649911

Mixamo Y-Bot character in the middle / back, and using the Salute animation
Manny - Retargeted the Salute animation, seems fine...
Gavin - Metahuman, using retargeted animation for that SKM (m_med_nrw_body)

Sequence starts with all in their passive state, then the Salute animation is applied - note how Gavin's shoulders drop dramatically. In other cases it's also the case, and super unnatural...

Any thoughts / solutions here are most welcome - thank you.

[hollow arch]

Follow this video
https://youtu.be/jH02x-VdQDs
And/or
https://youtu.be/5DoBSZ6_IQ0

[hollow surge]

Hey everyone
Anybody knows why I'm getting this weird voxelization shadows on the hair in UE5? I've been trying to solve it for hours but I can't
here are the render settings from the MRQ

[fathom galleon]

i'd like to add this skeleton in my metahuman hand. But those bones are individual meshes.. I guess i could merge them.

I'm looking for tips to properly match the metahuman rig with this

what's the proper workflow for this? I also have the proper vertex groups for the metahuman hand. would there be a way to transfer this to a new geometry by proximity or something?

[viscid blaze]

Hello Everyone, So I need some help on my metahuman. The one infront is an AI metahuman as you can see when ever i am trying to get close it changes to Metahuman Actor(Child class inside the AI character class) As you can see It has Tomato head. if i change the Hair(remove it) the tomato head still appears sometimes. Also the AI and the metahuman actor is using the same Skeleton body beneth but i still get the Height difference as you can see. Anyone Know how do i solve these 2 prolems ?

1. Metahuman hair is like tomato sometimes when get closed
2. Metahuman Height changes even it has the same Skeleton beneath.

[gleaming pecan]

Hey All I was wondering if any one els has been trying out the Hair Card generator. I have started to set it up but When I click on Generate Hair card a window is ment to pop up but I have nothing that comes up has any one els had this issue. Thanks

I just had a look in the error Log and I have this
LogHairCardGenerator: Error: Failed to find an active hair card controller.
LogHairCardGenerator: Error: No hair card generator controller found, cannot generate hair cards!

[gleaming pecan]

managed to fix it if any one else wants to know you have to bind the mesh to a skeletal mesh.

[fair narwhal]

Thanks Some - I think I've about resolved this. Note I've been avoiding using the Mixamo Converter as wanted to stay within the UE too chain. Here's what I learned:

The automated retargeter uses the default T-Pose, and it seems that using the T-Pose as the retargeting pose to go from Mixamo to Metahuman presents problems with the clavicles - hence the shoulder/shrug problem.

I found that by importing and using a more natural / relaxed pose (closer to idle or A-pose) within the Retargeter, these issues largely go away.

I'll ultimately document this further for myself (so much of what I learn I forget while figuring out other stuff!) - if anyone wants more details, let me know.

Again - thanks again Some for engaging here!

[hollow arch]

Its a known limitation/incompatibility. If you need root motion function you'll be forced to use one of many external and/or paid options. And even then, the paid in engine option is stupid inaccessible for fixing root motion absence/issues.

I need root motion so I used the converter & it batch converted all of them instantly. 🥰 A much different story than using external DCC like blender/maya. Good luck!

[nocturne snow]

Hi is there any place to buy regular outfits for metahumans? Looking through the Connect Clo-Set it's all pretty out there stuff, looking for more regular type clothes. Thanks!

[viscid fog]

Hello so i found out the binding was bugged so i attached to the socket

now theres a new problem

with the colors and weird shadow looking hair

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1252399426325188702/1288396084116324403/image.png?ex=66f507db&is=66f3b65b&hm=a84640545c95ed97496bd8dbd2603cf07937c4a6e379660fca04871d11ed2932&

the hair used to be blonde

https://i.gyazo.com/b3aa3aa9851aea77753a05e5c7ffad0b.gif

This was the issue

Im not too sure if its replication issue or not but from searching the forums for like 5 hours

looks like UE enables and disables the binding during runtime 😐

https://i.gyazo.com/62227a7b235972c129f8a7adc61df71a.gif

[river urchin]

Feels like everything I do in Metahuman Creator they always end up looking a bit asian. I think because of the eyes somehow, even if I choose other eyes in blend. I am trying to create characters that don't look like they came right out of the presets. Any advice?

[viscid fog]

my advice to that is make the model in other programs like makehuman, then upload to UE. After that migrate the face file into UE and use the metahuman identity tool. Finally use the editor.

[viscid fog]

looks like inside is blonde and outside is brown, meshing in each other or something

[hollow arch]

Maybe they are running face anim in the creator & compared to the default dead pan stare, it appears different.

[hollow arch]

Wild guess : might be interpolation issue?

[viscid fog]

you might be right

Ima change some stuff around 😛

[hollow arch]

People are reporting anim interpolation being "broken" in recent UE 5 versions (I have not experienced this myself).

[viscid fog]

everything metahuman is broken as hekk

[hollow arch]

User error most of the time 😉

(I'm coping)

[viscid fog]

😢

Card > Mesh > Strand for optimization?

man i tried a lot of things didnt work

still looks fuzzy and dual colored

might just abandon the blonde hair

[hollow arch]

Mesh is most performant

Cards mid, strands low

Most of the time the issue isn't optimization with metahumans. It's incompatibility between what people are trying to do & what is currently possible or not bugged

[flint seal]

Weird 5.4 aniamtion issues - Sequencer with metahuman with body animation applied just stopped working at some point. The animation and pose ignored. Went aheard and and did a control rig. Posed metahuman for static seated animation pose. Create keyframes. Works in initial test but then it too stoped and characters tanding straight up
What could I be ovelrooking that woudl cause this? Bug? It's odd I have 6 or so in a scene and work fien and othhers don't. some of them I can't set to Animation Mode. I set to BluePrint and save and it instantly restores to USe Custom mode.

Thoughts? Tips? Appreciated.

[viscid fog]

it is super expensive tho

[viscid fog]

thanks dude

[viscid fog]

https://tenor.com/view/edge-worth-phoenix-wright-shocked-ace-attorney-gif-26238267

[hollow arch]

Can you say 8 bit bone index?

[dire flame]

Hello, I'm wondering how and where to assign a T-pose asset for a Metahuman so it becomes the default pose ?

[viral magnet]

How can I fix this? I need help please. When I fix the camera to be in first-person it does this, the leg stretches

[viscid fog]

I don’t think a camera is doing that

[silver brook]

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2JVl/unreal-engine-metahuman-skeletal-mesh-optimization-guide

[silver brook]

maybe to pin this?

[hollow arch]

That would prevent me from having to spam it lol

[viscid fog]

Kewl

[silver brook]

!btw I just DM you, about the python script fix, I wonder how you recommend to debug if the script is working or not other than checking the FPS if they improve... amount of bones?
Is just to follow the readme.txt right? the startup scripts will do "their magic", no need to right click on the metahuman meshes or anything like that?
are the scripts with the quotes or only the content inside the quotes?
Thx

[hollow arch]

The only thing the script does his automates labor of entering in information or manually deleting bones. I'm talking like hundreds and hundreds of text fields or the currently buggy, and not working UI interface of deleting bones

The startup scriptus makes it easy every time you open the editor in that project.

For command line arguments, your positionals will be based off of the explicit name of the skeletal mesh asset in your content browser.

F_med_nrw in my case

The best use case for most people with my python.Script is the l o d settings data asset file. Deleting bones is not recommended under any circumstances. Unless you have no intention of using more than LOD

The magic of the l o d settings data asset is to phase the bones out without having to delete them. Deleting bones destroys all skin weighting for every LOD above 0. If you have the time to dive deep, you should be able to get it to work. Repeated the instructions add nauseum in multiple locati. Good luck!

[silver brook]

ok one moment, I appretiate your work but I followed the readme.txt and there is no instructions how to proceed, you mention some command line arguments. what it means, to past them in the command line? while in runtime? is it necessary to do it everytime we run the editor?

Thanks in advance! but at least to me that I never worked with Unreal and Python instructions are unclear

[hollow arch]

So python is not at runtime

Let me find the entry level official guide for python, where they will get you started on a framework

But first I want you to understand what the script intends to do so that I don't feel like I'm misleading you to thinking there's some ancient magic at work here.

Inside of the l o d settings data asset asset, which comes default with the metahuman. There is something called a bone list, which contains a list of bones from which to turn off calculation for for every LOD. This bone list provides the same performance increases as deleting the bone in blender and bringing it back into unreal engine. The problem my script fixes, that is most useful, is typing in explicit bone names into this bone list. If you wanted to test performance or visual Fidelity compromises after typing things into this phone list, it can be extremely laborious typing in case sensitive bone names into the LOD settings, data asset bone list hundreds of times.

So the python script automates typing this into the asset, and it allows you to save what you have already done. In that lod, settings data asset into a text file so that you can easily pick up where you left off or use the same exact settings later down the line or on a different asset.

[spice wave]

I’m making a crpg similar to wasteland 3 I was thinking of using metahumans but on the edge of trying to make my own 3d models of characters due to people saying there are performance issues was wondering if anyone has an opinion on this?

[silver brook]

Rig is very low performance, head bone has 785 children facial bones for example that will make impossible to have 60 fps when more than 6-15 metahumans.
I am trying to find a way with the above fix, some success but still nothing steady. it will be shared here if a good performance is accomplished

[viscid fog]

would love to hear this as well

[silver brook]

I will for sure

[silver brook]

this should be pinned and everbody who wants performance to start there

[viscid fog]

I just stumbled upon @hollow arch 's forum posts as well might just delete face bones

since im prob not gonna use face animations

[hollow arch]

Dont make me come down there and paste the link again! 😆

[viscid fog]

[celest vessel]

do you know where these dark spots could come from, and how to get rid of them?
happens also with vanilla metahuman in vanilla lighting

[viscid fog]

The hair?

[celest vessel]

yes

[viscid fog]

Does it only happen when you’re close

[hollow arch]

Try setting sky light to static & enable deep shadows on directional light. If all else fails, set use cards as true in blueprint groom component settings

[viscid fog]

@hollow arch the hair problem i was having

i task manager end tasked my editor cuz i was doing some mesh things

and then it broke a lot of lights

but also fixed the hair LMFAO

mystery

[celest vessel]

Yea only when it uses strands LODs

[celest vessel]

Will try that, ty!

[viscid fog]

have you tried doing forced LODs?

i forgot how i fixed it but i had this issue as well

[celest vessel]

Maybe you set it to an LOD that uses cards, but I don’t really want that

[viscid fog]

ahh maybe

[celest vessel]

I also tried all possible values in the material already

[hollow arch]

Strands simply do not shadow correctly I believe.

[viscid fog]

When fix metahuman

[hollow arch]

Theyre just fine wym

[viscid fog]

not for that guy

[neon seal]

Hey all, got something I'd love some help with - any thoughts on how to go roundtrip with a Metahuman from UE -> Houdini, apply a vellum sim to the mesh, while retaining facial mocap/facial morphs applied in UE?

Going roundtrip for body anims is straightforward enough with FBX, but the facial rig / curves get lost in that process (they aren't exported at the beginning, and you can't reapply them to the geometry cache brought back in from Houdini, or at least I can't figure out how to)

Super appreciate any help - thank you!

[coral fossil]

Hello I've been trying to create a head mesh using facebuilder in blender then using mesh to metahuman
However every time I tried it mesh to metahuman changes my head mesh to more like regular metahuman face instead of what I use from blender is there anyway to use mesh to metahuman without it changing the mesh or is there another workaround it?

[silver brook]

Hi, I think you need to dig deeper on Metahuman customization, there is something called DNA that you need to configure, then the FBX converter,... Honestly, I am not related to the author but the best thing so far is the blender addon Metareforge, is quite cheap compared to other solutions and works perfectly. I have been able to customize it to be a dwarf even pushing the limit on scale. Is just simply works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32PLLmDs9wE&t=396s&pp=ygULbWV0YXJlZm9yZ2U%3D
so, either you code your own tool or use one of the available plugins, as is a lot of work the setup of the aforementioned DNA, the fbx, material setup, normals,...

[silver brook]

that specific problem for example happens toggling the anim post process, but is fixed applying the correct DNA, once processed with this plugin for example as part of the whole workflow

[near quiver]

Does anyone know If I would still retain the rights to my character if I decided to build them using metahuman? I obviously know that metahuman assets may only be used with UE but Im talking about the character themselves. For example If i plan to use them in a comic series or any other media. I suppose a better way of wording it is their likeness and name. Would I still keep any copyright rights for my custom character if they were made using metahuman?

[silver brook]

give a detailed reading to the license, but as I understood rights will belong to you. Not sure if you just use the metahuman as it is and doesnt change anything, but I think even in that case is fine

but if you are gonna make something else than a game, the license, from 5.4 I think it changed, not sure if you have to pay seat, maybe only from some amount of money you starte to earn,...

[native spire]

Hey folks. Has anyone come across this strange blurring around the edges with Metahumans? Can't seem to find a way to get rid of it.

[silver brook]

yes! Can't remember exacty how I get rid of it, this is called sometimes as ghosting. Try different Antialiasing settings (in Project Settings), combine with Lumen on/off, your post process check it also,...

I think one in my solutions was to migrate the metahuman lightning demo maps to that project I was working with

maps that I recommend you to test first of all, to discard any kind of hardware limitation on your side