Great tutorial! It seems that the newly imported version of the face not have any baked LODs? I am worried that it would affect performance quite a bit in a scene with many characters. Would LODs not be possible while using blend shapes, or would the LODs automatically morph the decimated meshes as well?
You are correct, the LODS are not included when you follow my steps, in hindsight I should've included that part in this tutorial - I'll make sure to add it in part 2! To import your LODs, you must go through the same steps as you did when you exported LOD0 except this time you select your joints and the LOD1 meshes but *not* the blendshapes. This means of course that once you zoom out, your characters face will go back to the default face when it switches to LOD1, I haven't found a super nifty easy solution to transfer all those blendshapes to a lower poly version yet unfortunately but I am sure there is a way. Once exported, do NOT import it in unreal through the typical import menu. Instead open your LOD0 mesh and under LOD settings - LOD import dropdown, select Import LOD level 1, then select the LOD1 fbx. Repeat for all the other LODs.
Forgot to mention, you can also just generate the LODs directly in Unreal in the same LOD settings menu. Sadly they still don't include blendshapes though. It's less pain to just generate them but if you want the best LODs then it's best to import the ones from maya as they have been carefully simplified manually to ensure nice face deformation. Not that it's a huge bonus in fidelity but just worth noting.
@@DrHippo Thank you so much for taking the time to reply! That makes a lot of sense and I’ll try out both methods when I get a chance today. Hopefully the blend shapes won’t be super noticeable by the time you get to a distance they would be swapped out at.
10/10 no nonsense tutorial. Great job Hippo! I was thinking about giving this a go but it looked like it was going to take a lot of time to figure out. This tutorial is super helpful. I am looking forward to the next part.
Your comments are always very motivational! 🙏 First time I had to do this, just getting a metahuman with custom blendshapes to work in unreal was quite the journey 😅 Information on this topic is pretty scarce so hopefully this will save others from the headaches I had to endure :D
I was absolutely blown away by the previous videos on this. It’s akin to magic to me. By far the most exciting use for meta humans I’ve seen! Subscribed!
finally someone going to do this type of tutorial. i never was able to find one like this, all the tutorais i could find or where incomplete, or just how to change body parts or just change colors, or too basic, i really hope we get a more complete one like a then sims style where you have morph targets and change outfits and colors, and maybe add "details" like tatoos and others stuff, i really hope this tutorial go to the end and be a really as much is possible complete tutorial.
This specific tutorial series is gonna reflect the current state of my own character customization system. That means that outfits, tattoos etc is not included in this series. However I will be continuing my own system at some point, where I'll be working on things like tattoos, editing hair shape, body proportions, etc... Most likely not outfits though. When that happens I will most likely do a follow up tutorial series that builds on this one that goes through the same things I added in my system. So the goal is a complete tutorial, but it's a pretty long term project since it reflects progress with my own game :)
Hey, thanks for the great tutorial! I am running into an issue that I was hoping you could help me with. When I export my selection it seems that all of the skin weights are broken. I'm following all of the steps you've laid out, is there something I'm missing? Have you experienced this?
Hi Joe! Sorry for the late reply, nothing comes to mind right now just from what you've described. Can you join the discord and we can try to troubleshoot it together? :)
Hi! Thanks for the videos, really good stuff. Question here, you've shown how it works for one metahuman in tutorial, but you've shown us a lot of different faces in the devlog. Do you need to repeat the same work for each of them, or you were able to just swap the base and apply those changes on top?
Hi. When I export the mesh from Maya and import it in Unreal with the same settings I get jagged edges in facial lines during animation. Blend shapes are still there, the mesh comes from LOD0, bone hierarchy is good. What else could go wrong?
Take a look at this comment from @behrampatel4872, maybe it can help you : - I want to ask if you had a problem using the face board for animation in the sequencer one you go this route. The face board has stopped manipulating the imported mesh for me ! - I set the animation mode to Use custom mode and now i'm able to manipulate the face board
Did you ever fix this? I have not enountered this myself but I have been getting reports that this can happen, and that a simple restart of the engine should fix this.
Hello, a question please, why whenever I export a metahuman skeleton mesh (such as the head) to Unreal, it does come 90 degrees down, even if I change the axis in Maya, I always get it parallel to the ground! Thank you
Hi there! Have a look at your import settings in Unreal. Under miscellaneous there are some settings you can play with there. If that doesn't fix it, you can always force unreal to rotate your mesh on import, again in the import settings under import rotation.
{ sarcasm } don't you just love it dearly when someone goes to all the trouble to make a lovely tutorial such as this and then, EPIC goes and trashes them all by yet again changing systems! so in short your travels will come to an abrupt end around about the time you try to export to Maya from Bridge. UE(5.2)
I haven't looked at this for a while but will have to go over these steps again with the latest version of unreal so I can post an update on how to work around the changes, thanks for bringing this to my attention!
I've never touched LiveLink so unfortunately I don't know :( I've asked on my discord of someone knows, you can always join the discord and see if you can find answers from someone there? 😅 Sorry I couldn't help you :(
Another question please, suppose that I managed to change the face features as well as modified the joints structure to follow the changes I did in Maya, then exported the new head as you did above to Unreal, if I replace the head of the meta human in Unreal with the new face I did in maya (which is basically the same but different features), should I get it working with same facial controls and morphs, known that it is working perfectly in Maya? Thank you again and sorry for the long question, my main idea is to know if changing the other parts of the head including the eyes and the mouth could work in Unreal with the same facial setup of the original shape or with modified joints structure. Thank you
I'm not sure I understand the question completely. But I don't think you should be touching the joints unless it's the eye joints for editing eye location. I have done some tests with some pretty extreme blednshapes and animating on the default face still transfers pretty well to the morphed face.
Yes you can make these in Blender. I don't have any experience in Blender but here is a video that covers this : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pwbkwo0gnw0.html&ab_channel=DevRelated
Very insightful, thank you . Video 3 is so much fun. I want to ask if you had a problem using the face board for animation in the sequencer one you go this route. The face board has stopped manipulating the imported mesh for me ! Thanks none the less, Edit Start 01 - I set the animation mode to Use custom mode and now i'm able to manipulate the face board Edit End 01 b
@@DrHippo welcome. Also since the tutorial was done with the legacy input system I have modified it to work with the new input system. I cant post a link here to the screenshot but I hope you update the tutorial for the new input system. Cheers b
When i use the morph target in game it gives an odd fuzzy look/blur to the characters skin but only after when the morph is applied. im applying it via slider. could you recommend a way to fix this? (EDIT) turn on Precompute Skin Cache In Project Settings
I haven't worked on the body stuff yet but there would be problems with all the gear/clothes if it was done with blendshape, unless you also make all the body blendshapes for everything that can be attached to the character, which doesn't sound sustainable. So I think the solution is to use a whole bunch of joints and then copy skin weights from the body to the gear.
Hey! Can you join the discord and maybe share some screenshots/more info and I can try to see what's wrong. I don't remember seeing this error but maybe there's a mistake in my tutorial or something has changed 😅
Thank you very much for doing this tutorial, one question please, what if we manipulated the eye balls or the eyelashes, do we have to create blend shapes for those two and importa it separately to Unreal? I mean what if the resulting character needed has different eyes scale than the original metahuman, what should we do? Thank you very much in advance 😊
Good question! This was something I had a few issues with when I made my own system. For moving the eyes around you need to move the joints instead of making blendshapes, otherwise you will get some weird stuff happening when the character's eyes animates. Other than that you can change the eye shape with blendshapes just fine. You don't have to export separately though, just export all your blendshapes including all the eye blendshapes. I'll see if I can add this in part 5.
Thank you very much, it will be great if you do that, my target is to achieve a digital double of real person using metahuman, I will wait for p5 of your tutorial. Excellent work:)
Ok so how would I go about making a full comprehensive character customizer in ue4/5? Would I have to add a whole bunch of meta humans? I want it to be as random and unique for every person as possible if that’s what they want.
That's what this tutorial is trying to cover, but I guess it also depends on what you mean by "full comprehensive". If you just want them to look different then this tutorial should get you there. If you're thinking of tatoos, scars, different body shapes then that's not something I cover. Maybe in a future series who knows 🤔 Let me know if there is something more specific you feel the tutorial is not answering for you and I'll try to guide you the best I can :)
@@DrHippo That's what I was talking about, but also like if my game is a fantasy game and I want different races/I guess species of characters. Like orc, dwarf, etc. Either way this helps alot and I would love to see you do future videos about these things! Thank you in advance!
I personally only use maya for facial control stuff so I have barely touched the unreal face controls. Just guessing here but I don't see why it shouldn't work, the hierarchy is intact, it's just a different skeletal mesh.
@@DrHippo Logically that is correct, but I found that any process which includes replacing the original Unreal head with the Maya one does affect the unreal setup, including the hair attachment to the new head, and the facial control which doesn't generate anymore, if you manage to get a solution I really appreciate sharing it with me, thank you again
@@DrHippo no worries at all, I did find the full solution, perfectly works and functional, from customizing any head or body in Maya to have it both working seamlessly in Maya and Unreal, works with Unreal rig and setup automatically and the hair attached with no problems. I will share some more info about it very soon
Ah, in maya it's called corrective blendshapes and yes you could also do that in a game character. It's not something I'm covering in t his tutorial, but you could use some of the techniques to drive the blendshape according to joint rotations rather than according to mouse movement.
@@DrHippo I tried to fix it, it doesn’t work, eyebrows and eyelashes disappear and that’s it, in general, the free plugin Mesh to Metahuman is satisfied so far. In principle, approximately according to the same principle, you can edit the torso, you can make a thin person out of a character, or you can make a bodybuilder
NightCreature from the discord server says : "For anyone who's having trouble with Hair or Grooms in general and their behavior of disappearing, it's most probably due to LODs, when camera gets too far away the hair disappears, when camera gets close it comes back, sometimes in a weird shape like mine does, all you gotta do is go to your character components, go to LODSync, and insert 0 ( preferably 1 ) in Forced LOD"
