I’m trying to create clothes for my Metahuman character by converting the static mesh to a skeletal mesh and then weight transfering from the Metahuman body to the skeletal mesh. It all works, except that for some reason it’s shrinking the size of the skeleton (*Correction, it’s changing the bone transforms, not simply shrinking them) while leaving the mesh the same size. If that sounds difficult to parse, you’re with me…
Here’s a video to show what the heck is going on:
Somehow even though both skeletal meshes are using the same skeleton, the shirt’s skeleton is different. You can even see the angle of the shoulders is more shallow, the hips are in different places etc. Based on these differences, they are clearly using two distinct skeltons, and yet they’re not.
I just discovered that if you change the preview asset on the source mesh to the shirt, then when I drag it into the scene, it now matches the shirt’s bone transforms. What is going on here? According to my Metahuman, this is its source skeleton, yet it’s using the Female Medium skeleton even though it’s a male Metahuman. Is there a way to change this when assembling your Metahuman?
Okay, well, I submitted this as a bug, but I have also found the workaround. When converting your static mesh into a skeletal mesh, don’t choose “Use Existing Skeleton”, but instead choose “Use Existing Skeletal Mesh”. Clearly when a Metahuman is assembled or rigged, it changes the transforms of the underlying skeleton without changing the skeleton’s hirearchy, so Unreal sees them as the same even when they’re not. On further thought, that’s probably intentional, and not a bug.
