I am importing a MetaHuman I created into Unreal, however it has a lot of bones that are not necessary for the game I am making.
I took the body mesh from the MetaHuman and removed the unnecessary bones in Blender and reimported the mesh. However I still need to convert the face, torso, and other meshes included with the MetaHuman to use the simplified skeleton.
I would like to assign the simplified skeleton onto the other meshes, as well as onto other MetaHumans I import into the future. I tried assigning the skeleton, and I get the “Merge Bones” window which asks me, “Would you like to add following bones to skeleton?” and if I uncheck all the bones (which I do not want) it errors out with “Failed to merge bones to Skeleton”, and does not assign the skeleton.
Does Unreal have the ability assign a simplified mesh to a skeletal mesh with a more complex skeleton, or is there something more complicated going on that absolutely requires me to import all the separate pieces of a MetaHuman into Blender to swap the skeleton?
Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that this probably can’t be done directly in unreal. I’m no expert but I believe the data in the vertices/faces themselves have blend weights which are mapped to specific bones, so removing bones would probably cause some unintended consequences when it comes to animations (openings in the seams of the mesh or clipping).
Also, in my experience, parenting a Metahuman mesh to a simplified armature with automatic weights in Blender usually doesn’t work out of the box and a bit of vertex painting must be done in order to not have serious animation issues, such as having a bit of the mesh’s heel stay in place during a running animation, causing a big stretch in the vertex. It is a huge hassle anyways for a non-3D artist hoping to use Metahumans as a way to bridge my inexperience.
