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New Unreal Engine 5 .8 brings crazy update to MetaHuman, which now allowed to import complete custom mesh.
Tutorial on turning any custom humanoid character into a MetaHuman in Unreal Engine 5.8 using Blender, custom mesh import, rigging and baking.
Key Takeaways
- Unreal Engine 5.8's custom mesh import lets creators turn AI-generated or custom humanoids into fully rigged MetaHumans.
- Keeping the original pose through the DNA save step is essential for successful texture and normal map baking.
- Blender is used for preparing and combining meshes, while Unreal handles conforming, rigging and animation.
- Markerless mocap through MetaHuman Animator and Live Link can animate custom characters for games.
What the video covers
- Introduces the Unreal Engine 5.8 MetaHuman update that allows importing complete custom meshes to create rigged MetaHumans.
- Lists prerequisites: Unreal Engine 5.8 with MetaHuman plugins, Blender (free), the MetaHuman Conform body size reference from Fab, and an AI 3D generator such as Tripo.
- Explains how to prepare the base model: proper A-pose/T-pose spacing between legs and arms, separated fingers, high-resolution mesh, and removing hair and accessories from the head.
- Shows how to combine body and head meshes in Blender, apply scale and transforms, and export as GLB.
- Demonstrates importing the static mesh into Unreal Engine and running the MetaHuman custom mesh conform solve, saving the DNA pose so baking remains possible.
- Covers adjusting head, body, eye and teeth materials, then creating a full body rig and generating the skeletal mesh.
- Explains UV adjustment (shifting UDIMs) and baking normal and color maps from the high-poly reference body onto the MetaHuman.
- Shows how to add custom accessories such as ears or heads, parent them to the armature and transfer weights.
- Introduces the MetaHuman Animator markerless motion capture plugin and Live Link setup for animating the character.
- Discusses manual marker correction for problematic areas such as arms during mocap solving and final results for four characters.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to MetaHuman Custom Mesh Import
- 01:13Prerequisites and Tools Setup
- 02:48Preparing the Base Mesh in Blender
- 04:47Importing and Conforming in Unreal Engine
- 07:00Customizing Head, Body and Materials
- 08:30Rigging and UV Preparation
- 11:00Adding Custom Accessories and Weight Transfer
- 14:50Markerless Motion Capture and Final Results
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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But do you really understand how big is that? It basically means we can generate any custom humanoid character with AI, bring it into Unreal Engine and get a MetaHuman with facial rigs with body rigs that will support live link can be
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used in games or for example new markerless mo -cap animations. That is absolutely mind -blowing and in this video I'm going to show you a full tutorial.
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I'm going to make not only one but four characters to show you different cases, different options.
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No one did it on YouTube yet guys, so like that button on Nigeria's support, let's get started.
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So to get started we're going to need some prerequisite. Of course we're going to need Unreal Engine 5 .8 installs with all MetaHuman plugins. If you don't know how to do that you're going to go to options and make sure
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MetaHuman creator code data is installed. If it's not just check this checkbox and click apply that will download everything needed.
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Another thing in MetaHuman go to plugins and make sure or MetaHuman plugins are enabled then restore the Unreal Engine.
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For three, so we're going to use blender since it's absolutely free. We also going to need MetaHuman conform by the size reference. You can get it for free on fab. The link will be someone in the description.
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And of course we're going to need to generate that 3D. I'm going to use triple because that works best for me. But you can generate it any other based on your preferences. So I prepared four characters that we're
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going to create. You can see the all -hound different proportion, the acrobat, the shape, ballerina, very tall, thin hands, thin legs, very small head. We have Drow and Dread. The most complex here probably is Dread because we have custom head with
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those branches and stuff. So we're going to start with here. Other characters, there are few tricks that might be usable depending on the complexity of the character. So I'm going to show them one by one.
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Now let's start with the base workflow. So first of all, we need to prepare base treaty model that we're going to use as inputs for MetaHuman. So here, there are a few important things to take care of.
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First of all, we're going to need right post. I recommend a post. Make sure that there is some space between legs are there not too close. And the second important place is armpits.
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We don't want arm to go too close to the body. That might cause some issues when we're going to do mesh conform. We really want all fingers to be separated. The post doesn't really matter. What's important is that 8K
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texture really helps with big details. But of course, you're still going to need to crease it to 4K to not get too crazy on memory.
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Another thing that I'm not using smart mesh or low poly mesh for this case. This body will be a reference later for baking or transferring information such as normal maps. So you want it to be highly detailed. And I'm using
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HD model for this. Next up, we're going to need heads. I do head separate because, again, I want to keep details. I want everything to be accurate.
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Make sure there are no lashes or whatsoever because we're going to not need them. And we need to remove hair.
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With Dread, however, you can see that there are some branches. That's because we're going to do hair later and I want a seamless transition. You can see that all the branches and ears was generated as a separate mesh. That's how
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it should be. Any accessories like hair, etc. Everything but school should be removed. My case is more of an exception because of the transition which you're going to see later. And if you guys also want to try Trapod,
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there will be link in the description with the best promo code I could possibly get. And I honestly recommend it over any other AI tools. It has everything you might need. Well, that's pretty much it.
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Now we're going to bring it all to blender and combine that in one mesh. That we're going to use a reference for the metahuman. There are not much magic happening here. The only thing that you don't care about the mesh resolution,
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so keep it high -poly. Don't need to optimize. Just make sure that fingers are separated. That mesh fits overall. So like I just use some pose mode to combine things together. That's pretty much it. And we're also going to later use
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it for baking. So just make sure you like it overall. But keep it high -poly and join the geometry so you can pretty much make it one object. Last thing you do here before inputting to metahuman, let's drop here that metahuman
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conform body that you go from fab. This one is needed for a size reference. So when we export it there, it matches. The only thing we need to do here is just to set the size and then control A
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and apply scale and rotation. We need to make sure this is the original rotation. Before exporting, make sure transforms here are set to ones and zeros.
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Location doesn't really matter. Now we can export it as GLB. Again, that's just the static mesh or no extra settings to tackle. Time to open Unreal Engine now.
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I'm going to create third -person templates so later we can also run around and see how it works.
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Let's go to characters folder and create new folder for our dryet. Here I'm going to jog and drop our GLB that we just created which is the static mesh. Import it with default settings.
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You can check that everything is imported. Now we're going to need to create metahuman character here can create it in the same folder. Let's call it MH dryet and let's open it. So here we're going to need to go to
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import tab and choose from custom mesh which is by accident is the first tab and now let's find our static mesh of imported assets and drag and drop it here to combine mesh. There's also option to do that
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with separated heads and body but I don't find that convenient so we're just going to use combined mesh and you can see it's already uploaded here. So let's maximize that window and see what's happening here and pretty much that's it. Now
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we're going to need to press outer solve and see the magic happening. Here we can enable the math cup option so it will be easy for you to preview how the outer solving is working depending on your computer it might take
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to up to a few minutes. On my Nvidia 4070 super it was taking around two minutes and you can see that's happening in real time and here is the result. We have metahuman by the perfectly matching our character.
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Now here on this stage we're going to need to do something very important. We're going to need to go to manual solve action here and we're going to need to click save pose. That's going to save this DNA
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file of this state. You're going to save it anywhere we're going to save it like the dryet folder and this will save mesh in conformed condition because if we go to the next tab you can see the pose
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now is changed. Why is that important that we have original pose because later we're going to do the baking so we're going to transfer color normal maps and if the pose is not matching that will be impossible to do. So
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that fun for baking. Now we go to the next tab and there is head and body options.
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So first of all here you can adjust some parts say I want to make my eyes a little bit bigger etc.
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But overall I'm pretty happy. Then we go to material tab. So here we have standard metahuman settings.
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They added more skin tones for heads for body. You can actually play with it but we don't really need anything related to body or head. What's better here is you can set the eyes, teeth a little bit about
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that because we're going to keep them original. You can of course also edit them later just replacing texture etc. But in most of the cases you will be happy with it. So you can set the eyes and mouse
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here. The next tab we also can set hair and clothing but we don't need that we're creating custom character. We don't really need that. Now here the final step will be to create a full rig.
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To create a full rig that will take some time and after that we're going to also need to click download texture sources. This two action basically compile a sample, now we're metahuman all together and we'll save it locally so we can
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process it further. The good thing is that don't worry to get something wrong here. You can always go back to this metahuman and for example export that DNA that we can form.
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So that's reversible process all good here. Now if you did everything right you can I got folder called metahuman and our Dread will be actually here. Very nice. We can drop that blueprint to Unreal Engine and well that's not
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our custom character for sure. Well that's solid fine. Well now let's go make textures for us. So what we did before we saved that DNA file.
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Now we're gonna click generate skeleton mesh from it. Okay when that skeleton mesh generated that's exactly what we need. So this one we're gonna go and export how to do that go to acid actions expert that will export
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fbx and that fbx basically will be the mesh in that exact pose. What's matter that's still the same mesh with the right UV and so on.
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So let's go back to blender and drop that mesh here. And as you can see it perfectly fits our original body because now we can easily make texture to this body. Now let me show you how it's done. There are a
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few things that you need to know to not fail short is first that metahuman by default they use UDIMS if we go to UV editor and show everything gonna see that basically body isn't wrapped on the second island. That will
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not be possible to big that way in blender so we're gonna need to default it really. The default version is like one object and one UV like no UDIMS. Here's the easiest way to do that. We're gonna open it in edit
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mode and open UV editor on one side. We're gonna activate this option so it's synchronized and I'm gonna select the head carefully so it will select pretty much the head object.
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Again like in our religion they are separated. Head and body but we just export it like in as a whole.
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Now in treated you we're gonna press P and separate selection. That will create a separate object for head with this texture. For body however we're gonna need to go to edit modes in this UV editor.
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We're gonna need to shift the whole UV by minus one exactly so like it basically like we just shifted it as a UDIM. That's very important to get successful baking and now actually let's do that and guys if you're
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worried about blender involved don't be I do have free videos on my YouTube channel when I cover the most basics just for you so you can do that simple steps.
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I have video about sculpting that helped you to get used with that step that I showed in the beginning of the video and for baking I also have separate video explaining all the details behind it.
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Basically what we're gonna do here is we're gonna create a color map and we're gonna create a normal map and we're gonna bake information such as again color and normal from original body to body that we got from
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metahuman. It is done in cycles engine in blender we're gonna go to bake option here for color for example we choose bake type as a diffuse contribution we keep only color and we of course do selected to active and selected to
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active it means that we select our original body first and then select the next one to which we're gonna bake that information. In material editor we need to make sure that the right texture is selected and we can press
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bake and you can see the result the color baked nicely. There is a problem with the transition on the neck so what I did later is I actually went back to my original one and here I added like
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a simple notes, color, hue saturation and adjust it a little bit to match the body and since we're still gonna bake that information I just wanted to make my life easier later again like all that transition can be adjusted and I'm
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gonna show you how to adjust that in blender the same way exactly we're gonna need to bake normal map but in bake time we're choosing normal so here you can see now we have this volume like I mean normal map at
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depth but yeah there's a problem with the transition I'm gonna go to texture paint mode right in blender and with clone brush and smear brush just adjust this transition a little bit boss on color and normal map but baking
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is not the only way how to do that I'm gonna show you one more option how you can use AI texturing later in this video on another character this option however give you more control over bake it normal and again
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like since you have that high poly source you can add details there and transfer them later so similar way of course I did the body texture and now I can just save these textures and bring them to Unreal
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Engine so we go to metacumin folder go to buddy and we're gonna need to find textures they're in bake it folder and we're gonna just drop our new textures here so we're gonna drop body textures first then we're
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gonna do the same thing for head so there are two different ways how to do that look and either create you new material which will be simpler than the metacuman original material or you can replace maps directly in the metacuman
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material the thing is I'm gonna go to metacuman material which is body bake it and just gonna replace textures here and here go it's already started to look nice let's do the same thing for head don't be confused there are
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LODs so technically again depending on your use case you might need to replace that texture in all of LODs but for this example LOD zero is definitely enough for me very well here is our result we actually already did that but
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there are custom heads there are ears and there's a lot of things that I need to add so you can add unlimited bunch of things to your character and rig them on top that's very easy let me show you
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how for this now we're gonna need to go to metacuman and find this skeleton mesh of final metacuman that's not the same one we used for baking and there is a body and face separately again like depending of what part it
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goes to you're gonna need body and head you can actually take them both and bring them to blender just click on it acid action expert right it will expert that skeleton mesh together with the skeleton slash armature that we're gonna
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use to rig our acid so let's start with the head I'm gonna bring it to blender and here's how it looks like so don't be scared there's a lot of bones because there's a face rig based on bones you can actually
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hide the roots here to not be distracted and we're gonna now adjust our custom heads that we generated and triple to this head the process is pretty much the same I'm gonna use a sculpting mode and here's also the reason why
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I decided to keep some branches on the head to break them in the texture so we can have like a nicer transition all right my object is ready and now before we bring it on religion we're gonna need to
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make sure it's optimized I'm gonna do the decimation or again like you can generate it low poly right away because this acid is another reference this is actually the acid that you can bring and puts on your metacuman but
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what important thing we're gonna need to do is to give a right name and we're gonna need to parent it to our armature how do you select the object and select the armature with shift now press right mouse
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button find the parents and we're gonna need armature deform also you can do control P okay now we can see it's parented and this object is already on the armature and we need to transfer weights in my case
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this whole object will be 100 % on the head bone again all that facial bones we don't need so I'm gonna click on both objects go to weight mode find that head bone here go to weights and set weight okay
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the red mean basically it's 100 % on it depending on the nature of the object if you want custom brows for example you might need to interact with the mesh and maybe there's like a weight transfer or any other operation
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again there is a dedicated video on my channel about weights etc if you're beginner if you're professional I guess you can do that in any other way if your object covering face area that will be animated with metahuman
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you're gonna need to care about weights in general that also goes for body but I figure out that simple weight transfer from metahuman body works pretty well now when that's done make sure that your armature is named roots
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here and we're gonna need to export it right first select only armature in the object we don't need the head press export we're gonna use fbx we do not want to export texture so you can set it to auto in
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armature make sure ad leave bones are deselected very important or the armature will not match the skeleton there in geometry you can choose a smoothing groups and of course selected object only if you have any other files in scene
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export that and import into the Unreal Engine and one thing to mention if you did normal baking in blender or marmoset tool bag then in texture tab in import context menu you're gonna need to set flip normal map
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green channel that will make sure it shows as expected all right here we go so now we have our asset imported and it creates material instance and of course it imported the skeleton mesh now how to put it on our character
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very simple go to blueprint metahuman blueprint that we added to the scene here you can see the components and let's drag our skeleton mesh on the body and that's pretty much it we can save it and it's already there
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because the skeleton is matching when we drop it on the body it goes on top of the skeleton and if you did the weights right it will of course work with animations the similar thing I did for the
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body so I wanted that most on her body to add volume to that most on the body so how did I did that I basically imported that body duplicated the body to not mess with the weights and extruded
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in sculpting mode that most parts and then selected and cut them to another object and export it back to Unreal Engine it will also use the same texture but that just will add some volume on some ports and
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I can have control over it okay here we can see I'm setting up the material basically it uses the same material right boom and here is our final metahuman completed custom character ah that's so cool but that's it actually
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work with animation and all that stuff that I promised let's check right now I generated some video like a mockup video that we're gonna test right now and I also found some stock videos so for this we're gonna need
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live link hop and I'm not gonna go in depth into this marketless animation let me know in the comments if you want to cover it in more depth important thing is that to make it work you're gonna need to go
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to fab and find metahuman animator marketless motion capture and install that plugin restores the Unreal Engine and make sure that plugin is activated in Unreal Engine you're not be able to find it by default with that set in live link
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hop let's go to mono video ingest and here we're gonna set the folder with the videos there we go let's select them and add to queue so that will basically process them then in our explorer we're gonna have
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folder capture manager imports and yeah you will see all your videos and videos here is presented like entry files right we cool with that let's create metahuman performance file where we're actually gonna do the mockup let's open it
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here in footage capture data let's select the video that we processed and I want to see to preview the animation so we're gonna go to window image review and enable that so that's how we see the reference together
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with our animation now here in settings we're gonna need to enable body tracking that's very important and that will be only available plugin installed and it will make possible to select our metahuman so find that blueprint dryout all set and
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we can now finally process the video it will put some effort on your GPU depending on the resolution of the video so I don't recommend to upload here like 4k references it seems like to be dependent on the resolution
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here's a 1k reference and it works pretty smooth okay so all the processing done and let's preview that and our character is perfectly moving here's another animation that I tested it with and it's absolutely amazing you can of course
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export this animation later and use it in the game etc I'm still basically stunned how great this markerless motion capture works again it catches like the face all the emotions and for me again I saw the comparison with quick magic seems
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like this is way better and again guys just think about it like you have this all for free inside the Unreal Engine that conformed custom mesh to metahuman that's already huge and we have like quick magic basically and now we
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have this AI animation inside our Unreal Engine all working together that's so cool and as we have facial rig we can also connect it to the live link and get the facial capture from your phone and here you can see
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I tested our dryout and this looks just amazing like I don't know and of course you can use it as a character here is some of my final testing I basically replaced third person controller with my metahuman custom
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character and you can see the result is just amazing now let's create more characters since there are a few important things to share still let's do the acrobat so as you can see again the reference is very important I
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want some space in armpits legs not too tight and he is bald because if you are not going to remove hair the mesh will conform around hair and it will result in a very strange skull basically the same process I
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generated head hair body and triple brought them to blender assemble similar process however when I started to do auto -solve basically can conforming body to my mesh there was an issue the fingers were not recognized right you can see
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it here like in two fingers they've put four fingers in two fingers now we're gonna press reset body in this case don't worry that's very easy to fix you can see all the hotkeys are suggested here in metahuman basically
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control left mouse button right mouse button that will help you and which shift that will add some points and with this tool we can manually align points again depending on the complexity of the character the more custom it is the
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more likely it can happen in some area and in this problematic area we can just help it a little bit so here you can see I just set the markers myself for the arms and there is not enough points you can
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actually add some new points and also map it to our body that's absolutely not difficult and after that you can press solve body and here's the updated results exactly as we wanted you can do that for face as
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well etc the process later was identical we exported that pose into DNA then from DNA we exported that mesh and I did the baking this time for the man I did baking in marma set toolback just to show you
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like different approaches then a little bit of adjustments here and browse I did the same way in blender because again like I had to export that face mesh and make sure I rigged it don't forget to export it with
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the right expert settings always remove that leave bones and it will work extremely smooth then just drag and drop that skeleton mesh onto your metahuman blueprint and here we go awesome right now let me show you one different approach
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how you can deal with the texture let's say you don't want to bother with baking and you creating a toilet game why do I need that normal map so we're gonna create draw we're still gonna create head separate for details of
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course we're gonna remove hair and generate hair separate I can assemble all of that in blender but in this case I will not really care about texture I only care about shape and you know why don't forget to scale it
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right according to the unreal engine body join it into one object and bring it to the unreal engine now what will be the difference here is that after we did the conform will not need this pose because we're not going
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to do the baking and we can skip that part and go continue to set eyes mouse pretty much eyes the only thing we really need here now instead we're gonna need our final metahuman in metahuman pose we're gonna go
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and find that skeleton mesh for body and for head that's similar mesh that we need to create accessories now let's export them and bring to blender now notes when you export head and I would also export everything but head like
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eyelashes mouse etc we don't need that because we will not gonna change your texture of it so here in the materials I suggest to click on the facekin material and select it so it will select the mesh with this material assigned
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and then separate this selection and the other part we can simply delete because we only need the face mesh that face material we're gonna replace only that texture and we also can delete all the materials from that for the
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body is easier it's only one material one body that's fine and don't forget to move the UV for the body because it still uses you deem in unreal engine space we do not use you deems and it will not work
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with AI texturings either well with this set we can export our new mesh well again that's a metahuman mesh with metahuman UV also you can see I added here right away and here's so it texture all together in triple so we're
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gonna export it as GLD you don't need to export skeleton here it's not needed we're gonna go to triple and import our objects don't forget to set rotation to 90 here and do not disable use original UV keep it
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because we need that metahuman UV that's whole thing all right we have it here now we can upload my original reference for the texture here and put that texture on new metahuman body here we go and that exported GLB
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will basically give us separate color texture for body here you can see the body texture that followed the UV exactly and for head as well you can see the head and for hair also that's absolutely great now you don't have to
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care about the transition it all matches very nice that means that we can take those textures right away to Unreal Engine and replace them for the hairs in ears I of course did it in the same way I set the weights
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and then transferred them as static objects with the material etc the process there looked the same and for this character I wanted to try a tune shader I tested the tune shader and here we go with the results
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guys that was super fun and again all of this you can do within an hour per character again you can iterate add more details but the basic process is extremely fast I don't know I'm super hyped about this workflow I
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was really not expecting it to be that great and useful so yeah you could say I was excited I created like four character at once last character was probably the easiest no issues here whatsoever so basically it's a tool ballerina
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small head long legs in arms again all the same things here head separate for details again for accurate mapping we don't want blurry mesh because that might make difficult out of solving she's bald of course hairs separate in anything that's
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not fit the body exactly might be separate in a different assets such as her dress out of solving setting eyes pretty much same exact process then big texture replace the texture add the accessories combine them all together in Unreal Engine and
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we already can do the ballet animation how cool is that guys let me know in the comments I of course does it every character with the live link that's probably the most funny spot again that face rig is most impressive
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but again it maps everything so accurate that I don't know like if you remember I was showing the similar workflow with the paid plugin that does that thing that paid plugin was not giving that great result as we
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can get here for free it was never been easier to create custom humanoid characters with AI as it is right now hope this tutorial was helpful for you that was step like and subscribe and I see you in the next videos
Topics:MetaHumanUnreal Engine 5.8Blendercustom characterAI 3D generationriggingmarkerless motion captureLive Linknormal map bakingcharacter creation
