Clothing for Metahuman from static mesh

Development Character & Animation
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1

hi all,

I’ve been trying all weekend to get even one piece of custom clothing imported using the Chaos Cloth plugin because I would really love to have a nice flowing dress for my character, and the examples I’ve seen look great.

I’m using UE 5.4.4 and followed the procedure from this video and this one (which explains how to use a static mesh instead) all basically following this workflow:

  • created a Metahuman character that I would like to use
  • exported the character as .fbx
  • imported into Blender
  • create of find a piece of clothing
  • import that in Blender and fit it to the Metahuman body
  • export the fitted garment to fbx and import in Unreal editor
  • add some material to the clothing
  • check the fit on the character
  • create the Cloth Asset
  • add a StaticMeshImporter node to the blueprint
  • import the clothing mesh
  • connect the StaticMeshImporter to the TransformPositions node
  • watch it crash horribly
  • look for more information, watch some other videos trying to find a solution
  • repeat until headdesk

I don’t want to use Marvellous Designer, it’s way too expensive for the two or three times I’d use it. Actually, if I could find some pre-made suitable dresses for Metahumans in the Unreal market place, I’d just buy those.

I think I tried about two dozen different clothing meshes - some make from scratch, some from Artstation and other sites, and none of them would even import in the plugin as in the second video.

The error I am mostly seeing is:

AssetCheck: /Game/Clothing/Dress10/FloralDressAsset_Dataflow Validating asset
LogClothingMeshUtils: Warning: Failed to generate skinning data, found coincident vertices in triangle (397, 6,704, 6,703), points A=X=-20.194 Y=11.473 Z=71.296 B=X=-0.212 Y=12.055 Z=70.162 C=X=-0.212 Y=12.055 Z=70.162

with that last line repeated about as many times as the clothing has vertices. Which makes me wonder if it is maybe getting duplicated somewhere in the procedure, but I cannot figure out why it would do that.

As I’m writing this the thought came up that there are maybe some cached files in the project that mess things up - I’m trying this in a dedicated project with just some flat terrain and the metahuman in it, and have tried several dozen different pieces of clothing in it. I’m now so fed up with this that I’ll let it rest for a few days, but if anyone knows if this sort of thing could happen when new clothes are added to a character a number of times over, removed and added again with the same mesh or something else - please let me know.

I’d also love to know if anyone has been successful adding custom clothes from a static mesh to a Metahuman character using the Chaos Cloth plugin, and how you did that :slight_smile:

As always, any suggestion is much appreciated :heart:

2

Today I found some other forum topics about the same problem, but they were all related to importing UDC assets, not static meshes.

I decided to go ahead and buy one of the clothing packs so that I’d have at least something that works that I could use as an example.

I spent some more time today trying to understand how it works but there are so many concepts and workflows involved with Marvellous Designer and Chaos editor and skeletal meshes and static skeletons and UDC and Fortnite (Why? It’s a game isn’t it?) and every video telling me to activate another set of plugins - chaos tools, modeling tools, static mesh tools … enough to made me dizzy.

The last enigma I was being tripped up by was that apparently MH characters require their assets also having all MH LOD levels present - but try finding out how to go about setting that for a fbx mesh :roll_eyes:

I hope I can at least figure out how to customise the clothes in that pack … that would be cool.