Discussion - MetaHuman Body Shape Adjustments

[Gunslinger86]

Hey I just wanted to discuss some things about MetaHuman here and im keen to know what other people think about this Topic. Especially scince MetaHuman just received another update and i felt kind of let down by it.

Im planning a new Project at the moment and Character Creation is a tall order for me and my team as we dont have specialists for that and we were hoping to get “easy enough” tools to get the job done decently, so of course MetaHuman was quite interresting and i kept a close eye on it.

Dont get me wrong so far its looking good and its a very interresting application especially with the native unreal engine 5 compatibility and all but there are a few things that are a dealbreaker for me in MetaHuman id like to point out and i would love to get other Devs oppinions on (maybe im missing something here?!).

The first part i find a bit lacking is the amount of customization options the tool gives you at the moment:

Makeup, Hair, Beard all of those are very generic (which i understand) but also very limited in number.

The Second but more important point for me is that you can not adjust the body shape:

All you can do is pick from presets and if you dont like them, well bad for you. This is kind of a dealbreaker for me and i dont understand why you can adjust the face/head in detail but the body is just set in stone and you would need to replace it with other bodys outside of the application (then i might aswell do everything without MetaHuman). I get it that you cant do crazy stuff with it or the rigging/skeleton might not work good anymore but comon, let me at least adjust a bit about it like waist size, muscle build, body fat in certain areas and such, those should not break any rigging right? We had Body Sliders back in 2005 in Games that “limit” how extreme you can go yet gave you enough freedom to really customize. I refuse to believe MetaHuman “cant” do that!?

Im just hopeing they will add this feature soon because as it stands now id rather go for Character Creator 4 that is giving me a lot more freedom.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

[JaredTherriault]

Same. Hoping in the future as the feature matures that body shapes will be given some more love beyond 9 presets.

You can use an animation blueprint to scale and translate some bones to achieve some different body type effects like scaling out the spine bones to achieve different waist sizes, but ultimately without morphs you end up pretty limited for character customization.

We ended up going with Daz. It’s a lot of work to re-rig and re-material but you can then import the basic character with all of the morphs and customize them in-game and bake down the end result, removing the rest of the morphs at runtime.

[maniacarta]

I agree with what was said, metahuman is good but for body anatomy it’s lack of options and all body look weird, a good body proportion such fashion model have long legs and metahuman doesn’t have that and character sometimes look like aliens, it’s possible to change all that in Blender or Maya and I done it and it work great but it’s better to have good features for metahuman body.

Hope we get this kind of feature soon and I am sure Epic will never disappoint you because same what was released recently as new metahuman version with many hair styles, studio light and the mesh to metahuman then for sure they going to make such feature for artists.