Clothing for Metahuman from static mesh

Development Character & Animation
,
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.

1 Like
3

I’m completely lost too. I cannot get Metatailor to export on my Win 11 pc. I’ve tried everything. so now im researching how else i can get the clothing asset i purchased from CG or Turbosquid and PUT it onto my metahuman, so far I’ve found a tut on exporting the asset into Blender THEN SEPERATING EACH PICE of the outfit into different FBX files and then exporting them to my pc, and importing into unreal via the sep fbx files off my pc. ironically, learned this step FROM the METATAILOR TUT but this was a disclaimer because evidently there has been a lot of ppl having issues with MSFT DEFENDER blocking their app, such as myself, however all the workarounds ive read so far has not worked for me. but, the sep fbx files they come in missing info ( ‘wieghts’ i believe? im a newb obvi) and as static meshes. Idk how to turn them into SKEL meshes so i can sub them into the SK mesh slots for my outfit on my MH. I think im supposed to add that info in blender but idk how to do that either lol. guess ill search for a tut on adding skin weights on blender maybe? idk

4

I did have some success at last, though it seems as if every issue I solve there pops up another one :smiley:
Anyhow, maybe this video is helpful? It is about UE 5.5.

5

This is what I did so far, and the only thing I need to still figure out is how to add the Cloth Asset to the Metahuman in such a way that it actually simulates properly. Right now I can either add it to the “body” skeletal mesh element, and then the dress does not fit properly, but the physics simulation works; and when I put it on the top level character-mesh (one level higher) the dress fits perfectly but the physics don’t work any more.

Steps that I figured out until now:

  • found a FBX clothing static mesh I liked. It consisted of a thin (single layer) and a thick (double layer) mesh, as far as I know it was made with Marvellous designer.
  • I edited the thick FBX in Blender to fix some mesh faults, extra duplicated pieces of clothing, etc.
  • I remeshed the thin fbx because it was very high poly and did not have an uniform vertex density. But yeah, I really loved that dress, so I shouldn’t complain … I also reduced the vertex count with the Blender decimate add-on.
  • exported the Metahuman mesh, imported it in Blender
  • fitted the clothing - both the thin and thick versions - on the Metahuman body. I think that it is important to have no vertices overlapping from clothing into the Metahuman mesh, so I made sure it was OK
  • make sure to apply the scale of the mesh in Blender before exporting as FBX
  • import thin and thick meshes in UE
  • make sure the required Chaos Cloth plugins are active in UE 5.5
  • create the Cloth asset
  • open it in the editor and import the static meshes as described in the video I linked to in the previous post
  • use Skeletal Mesh asset from the Metahuman
  • add an animation asset to see if the simulation works OK
  • paint the weight map in the WeightMapMaxDistance node
  • use the physics asset from the Metahuman character in the SetPhysicsAsset node
  • that should cover most of it
  • as I mentioned, I haven’t yet figured out how to use the Cloth asset on the Metahuman character. It’s probably just some deeply hidden switch I forgot to flip :wink:

Because the dress I wanted to use is really wide with lots of folds, it may be too much for the cloth simulation. On some of the tests I did I noticed that vertices from the Sim (thin) mesh seemed to be fused to one another, leading to the weird artefacts like extra ribbons of cloth connecting folds appearing. But, I’ll see what happens. And otherwise, I’ll take a different one, by now I am familiar enough with all the steps that it might not take me another two months this time :sweat_smile:

I hope this has been of some use to you, or anyone else struggling with this!

6

This is also a good resource