Skin tight clothes fit perfectly on the preview version (exactly the same as in MD) but sit inside the skin on the original mesh.
Are you finding any issues with skin tight clothes or are yours working ok?
Trying to work out what i’ve done wrong. I believe I may have retargeted the skeleton a while back wonder if that could be the cause? I suppose it wouldn’t then work with the preview mesh right?
perhaps the skin weights are slightly different on the preview mesh?
Are you using LOD 0, if you export the actual body mesh and then import straight in to MD it has all the LOD, the lower quality LODs are slightly different. You’ll need to import in to something like blender and the lower LODs and just keep LOD 0, export that to MD and everything should be the same. I’ve just run some quick tests and everything seems to be comparable. The only thing to note is the skin offset of the Avatar in MD, when you import a new avatar the offset defaults back to 3.0.
Other than that I’m not really sure what’s going on, just make sure your MH mesh and your Preview mesh are the same meshes and also on LOD 0.
Please share if you have any updates.
I’ve just checked and everything uses LOD0. I’ve not really touched the actual body mesh settings. They are at auto 0. I have only ever used the preview mesh to export, so the actual mesh has never been in MD, as i’m guessing the neck collisions would be incorrect without the head.
I find the process of exporting and reimporting skeletal fbx files to maya pretty troublesome, so have tried to avoid.
For this particular animation I think i will have to pursue the head removal, (as it’s ready to go) and later down the line i will try to troubleshoot what’s going on. But for the moment my hunch is that in my case the preview mesh and the actual body mesh are deforming slightly differently.
You could delete the head geometry in Maya and then import the preview mesh without head back to unreal as a new skeletal mesh and apply that in your BP, I’ve just tried it and it works. As you can also see I had deleted a couple of extra triangles by mistake.
Thanks, for some reason my maya fbx’s refuse to import into Unreal. That’s why i was trying to avoid the whole maya thing. But I guess i will have to work out the precise workflow to get FBX files between the two apps. Never really had much luck with maya and fbx in all my years of Maya experience 
So i deleted the non deformer history (after deleting the faces) and finally managed to export the fbx with autodesk media entertainment settings with ‘input connections’ unticked. This seemed to work. I then import the fbx into unreal and choose ‘metahuman_base_skel’ as the skeleton. It then says ‘FAILED TO MERGE BONES’ This could happen if significant hierarchical changes have been made, etc…this may invalidate animation data etc
My hope was that if i could turn the head off with an opacity mask (or even a seperate translucent material) i wouldn’t need to do any more exporting and importing, and could keep it clean.
But the standard full body preview mesh has some very weird Uv’s- the head seems to be in 0-1 space and the body beyond 0-1, and yet there appears to be only one UV channel. If you apply the body texture to it it covers the body with the correct texture and the face with the body texture also. I’m trying to figure out where it gets it’s texture coordinate info from
Whoop whoop finally got the fbx to import! It seems it has something to do with the grouping in Maya. I just used the original animation and imported that without the head. But the mesh and skeleton has to be ungrouped in the outliner i think. Anyway I will try to figure out exactly what works and doesn’t so i can post the process for other maya users…
Hey, have you managed to resolve this? I also go the same issue where MD clothing works great on the preview mesh but not the blueprint MetaHuman.
Hi, sorry was going to come back to this but had a big project. I ended up just deleting the head from the preview mesh and using the LOD 0 metahuman head with the headless preview body. It worked fine. Once you get the maya fbx settings right it’s easier to swap back and forth, but they are pretty unreliable and it’s not a particularly user friendly inter-operability between apps
Oh so you decided not to use the LOD 0/blueprint version of the body? That’s what I’ve been trying so far but have had no luck.
Yes I gave up trying to bring the LOD 0 of the body back in…just couldn’t get the ■■■■ thing to export correctly from Maya. it was actually quite effective using the preview mesh without the head in my particular case as the scene was a little lighter and the mesh itself was largely invisible anyway. I think next time i might try to use the LOD 0 and export the head and body separately from Maya to MD, although the metahumans do seem very slow to work with in Maya…
I see! I haven’t used maya yet - but so far my workflow has looked like this video (exporting mh preview mesh instead of cc3 character).
There should be a way to do this properly as I’ve seen videos like this. The person does mention a solution in the comments but I’m not sure how they export the correct fbx animation with the bp mesh.
Are you using cc3? Always wondered what it’s like.
If you are exporting your initial LOD 0 animation out of Unreal are you exporting the seperate parts individually? I had assumed the only reason you need the maya/blender step was to bind the head/body/torso etc together, so you can sim it properly in MD…?
Is it an export from unreal, can’t you change the rotation on export?
Since writing my findings back in July I have found a better workflow, the best way is to export directly from sequencer, you’ll need to have animation tracks applied to both your face and body, you also can’t have anything else applied to the blueprint like shoes or clothes as I find it messes up the export for some reason. In sequencer you need to just right click the main bp and export direct from there, once you import in to c4d or what ever you’re using, depending on what’s going on in your animation you’ll probably have to delete the skinning between the mesh and the skeleton and then make sure your mesh is centred to your skeleton axis and then delink them. From there it should all be good.
This option gives you the exact replica from unreal, meaning that if you’re simulating clothes like I have been In Marvelous everything is aligned back in unreal. In my previous examples noted above there was a problem with different weights and if there were clothes close to the neck because of the weight difference the neck would be slightly out. Without putting together an actual tutorial it’s kind of had to explain but it’s the most solid method I have found.
Hope that helps a little to get you on your way
Also to get the animation out of your dcc in to Marvelous use an alembic as I haven’t been able to then export the animated FBX from blender to Marvelous, this can give issues trying to apply the fitting suit in Marvelous as it never likes the alembic on the shoulder area when selecting the points for the fitting suit but you can just use the original pose with an FBX for that, apply your clothes then import the alembic animation if you’re wanting to simulate the clothes on the animation. If you don’t want to simulate and only build the clothes then you can apply one of my methods above which I mentioned, back in July as they are easier but less accurate.
Ah that’s great! I have just been importing the alembic straight in to unreal and selecting the geometry cache on import and it’s been fine, I always use the other h5 option and also been using 4.27. Also on the import options there’s a texture setting and a setting for normal calculation hard edge. Set the hard edge to 0 then it will be more accurate and set the texture option to max, it’s some thing like 16 or your textures will be messed up. Also only works with MD10, MD11 has issues with the alembic export at the mo which they are fixing.
Yeah MD11 when it was exporting was handy as it could export top stitch as geometry so nice for the extra detail, that’s when it exported but didn’t export the cache, now after the last update it just crashes. The team at MD say they will fix it for the next update. I’ve just been doing this workflow so let me know if you have any more questions, see if we can share some info, if your export and import settings are correct you can get away with body offset at 0.
It’s rewarding once you get to where you’re trying to go, keep up the good work.
