I have been dabbling inside MetaHuman since the past week, for Reference I am using Version 5.6.1 and 5.7.4 for trying to crunch out Hyper-Realistic characters.
The bug/ issue/ problem is that the Face texture for LOD0 and LOD1 which I want and have set to 8k and 4k for another character are not baking/ generating I have tried to solve this by doing the following:
Enabling Virtual Textures Lightmap inside the Project settings.
Rebuilding the Rig.
Re-downloading the source textures
Enabling all other ChatGPT recommended settings that are related to Virtual Texture.
I have also run these commands “r.Streaming.PoolSize 4000” to solve the GPU caching issue.
Although I want all the textures in 8k… I even reduced the resolution to 4k inside the assemble menu.
The Hair rendering is also being an issue.
They do not render in the Strand Based setup which normally offers the best output from metahuman.
PN: I cannot ‘settle’ for a lower quality.. So I request you to not suggest to '“lower the quality” or “convert to haircards”
Also, In the screen shots I have attached below, I lowered the Texture to 2k just to get some output at LOD0
One more thing to note I have used the Preset ‘Walter’ to test if the issue was with customization. So the Old man with longer hair is Walter
The image below is a personal Customized character. (I do not know why the stats suggest the textures to be 2k but believe me I have Assembled the character while keeping everything at 8k once and 4k once) and also please look at how the hair renders in both the images
I forgot to mention a crucial detail about the project, that it’s a VR Project.
But I managed to solve the issue with the help of Gemini and I am sharing the solution for future references.
The following settings need to checked or changed additional to what is already mentioned in the post
In the console command “r.VT.PoolSize 4096” or 8192.
Check the Default RHI: 8K MetaHuman textures and strand hair require DirectX 12 to function correctly. Go to ProjectSettings > Platforms > Windows and ensure your Default RHI is set to DirectX 12.
Inside the MetaHuman BluePrint click on the LODSync component and in the Details panel Change Forced LOD from -1 (Auto) to 0.
Compute Skin Cache: Strand-based hair requires this to follow the head accurately. Go to Project Settings > Engine > Rendering and ensure Support Compute Skin Cache is checked.
Ensure Enable Virtual Texture Support is checked (requires restart).
There is a massive known issue in 5.6 where having Substrate materials active during the Assembly process causes the high-res texture generation to fail, resulting in either completely black textures or the missing/checkerboard fallback you are seeing.
Go to Project Settings > Engine > Rendering.
Find Substrate materials (beta) and completely disable it.
Restart the engine.
Delete the previously generated/assembled folders for this specific character in your Content Browser to clear out the corrupted files.
Open your MetaHuman Character asset and hit Assemble again
Forward Shading Conflict
If you are working in a project that originated as a VR template, or if you tweaked rendering settings for performance earlier, Forward Shading might be on. The LOD0/LOD1 shaders for the new MetaHumans absolutely hate Forward Shading and will reject the high-res textures entirely.
Go to Project Settings > Engine > Rendering.
Under the Forward Renderer section, make sure Forward Shading is unchecked. If it was checked, unchecking it will require a restart and shader compilation, but it will allow the skin to render.
