I’m building a paramteric MetaHuman outfit with the cloth asset and I can’t find a way to stop a specific bone from influencing a region of the mesh.
The piece is a rigid collar anchored at the chest. Its upper edge
sits close to the chin, so TransferSkinWeights, matching by proximity,
assigns full head influence to the top of it. First image shows the
weight visualization: the collar is solid white on head.
The result is that the top of the armor rotates with the head while the
base stays anchored to the chest. It’s rigid geometry, so any deformation
at all reads as broken.
What I’ve looked at so far:
Manual skinweight cleanup after assembling the metahuman works but ideally this could be fixed without needing that as it should be a parametric outfit.
An InpaintMask weight map, so the upper collar gets weights from the lower part but this didn’t work at all. If someone knows how, please let me know!
Questions:
Is there any way to exclude a bone from the transfer for a given
region?
Are there Dataflow nodes for refining or overriding skin weights after
the transfer?
How are people handling rigid hard-surface pieces inside a cloth asset
generally? Is the expectation that they stay out of the Panel Cloth
pipeline and ship as a separate skeletal mesh section with hand-
authored weights?
Engine version: 5.6-5.8
Will post results back if I find something that works!
Hi! We’ve been running into a similar issue with rigid shoulder pads: they should follow one specific bone, but the transferred weights introduce unwanted bending.
Rigid pieces still need deliberately assigned skin weights, even if the manual adjustment is very small. For a collar attached rigidly to the chest, I’d assign every vertex of that rigid piece 100% to the same appropriate chest/spine bone, removing all head and neck influence, with no smoothing or blending between bones. That should keep the piece moving as a single rigid object during animation.
The tricky part is keeping those weights through the parametric workflow. The outfit is fitted to different body shapes, and the automatic skin-weight transfer can overwrite those assignments. Epic mentions this limitation in its parametric clothing guide. I saw that you’ve already confirmed manual cleanup after Assembly works, so the missing piece is a reliable way to preserve or reapply that rigid weighting automatically. I don’t have a verified setup for that yet.
There’s also MetaHuman Cloth Assembly, which might be relevant if your outfit includes simulated cloth. It’s an editor plugin for UE 5.8 designed to preserve Chaos Cloth simulation through MetaHuman Assembly and handle the resulting cloth setup automatically. Its focus is simulated clothing, though, so I wouldn’t expect it to solve the rigid collar’s skin-weight issue.
Are you also losing cloth simulation after Assembly, or is the unwanted bone influence the only problem you’re running into?
