Hi! We’re a small studio in Denmark making a gothic ARPG in UE 5.8.3 with MetaHuman heroes (male and female bodies), and armour fitting has become our biggest time sink.
Our setup: armour pieces are imported as skeletal meshes (the source meshes come from Tripo, so they’re dense and not built around MetaHuman topology). We auto scale and align them, transfer weights from the MetaHuman body, and then use Garment Tool (Fab) for skinning, posing and hide masks.
Rigid pieces (helmets, bracers) are fine: they just follow a bone. The problem is anything close to the body: chest pieces, shoulders, boots. Garment Tool doesn’t conform the shape to the body, so every set needs manual fitting, twice (male + female). Idle looks fine, but in attack animations we get gaps and skin poking through at the shoulders, waist and knees.
Things we’ve learned so far:
MetaHuman preset outfits delete the body faces under the clothing, so “skin through armour” can be missing geometry rather than a bad fit.
Weight transfer onto dense meshes is unreliable until the mesh is cleaned up (we’ve had TransferBoneWeights crash on orphan vertices; remove unused verts and compact the mesh first).
New skeletal meshes need “use mesh bone proportions”, or the reference skeleton becomes the shared MetaHuman base and garments fly off when posed.
Questions:
How do you conform a close-fitting armour shell to a MetaHuman body before skinning? Proxy cage, signed-distance push-out, Mutable, Chaos Outfit / Outfit Asset, something in Blender?
Do you hide body parts under armour with masks, or cut the body mesh per outfit?
Any workflow or tool that makes one fit work across body shapes (male/female, different builds)?
Happy to share our Python and Garment Tool scripting in return.
Thanks in advance! For context, the game is Crawling Darkness, a gothic ARPG with online co-op, in free alpha: https://crawling-darkness.com
Conform the shell in DCC before you skin it. Garment Tool and weight transfer will not pull a dense Tripo mesh onto the body, so most of the time you are spending is that missing step.
What has worked for close-fitting armour on MetaHumans:
Export the actual generated body for that hero (male and female separately) in the same bind pose as the armour. In Blender, clean the armour first: Merge by Distance, delete loose verts. That is the same cleanup that stops TransferBoneWeights from dying on orphan vertices.
Conform with a cage, not a raw shrinkwrap of every Tripo vert. Shrinkwrap a low poly cage to the body with a small offset, then Mesh Deform / Surface Deform the armour through that cage. On hard plates, move only the inner contact verts and leave the silhouette alone. After the shape is right, Data Transfer weights from the body (nearest face interpolated), Normalize All, and cap influences at 4. Copy weights on the border verts (shoulders, waist, knees) from the nearest body vert, or attack poses will open gaps even when idle looks fine.
One mesh will not fit both sexes. Shoulder, chest and pelvis differ enough that a single rest pose slides. Two fitted meshes on the same skeleton is the small-team version. Mutable is the one that scales: a body-type parameter plus a morph between the male and female fit, and section visibility per piece. Chaos Outfit / Outfit Asset is for simulated cloth layers, not for a rigid plate that has to stay a fixed shell.
Hide the body with a mask, do not delete faces per outfit. Preset MetaHuman outfits remove faces under the clothes, which is why skin showing through is sometimes missing geometry rather than a bad fit. For your own sets, bake a mask (vertex color, or verts within a few mm of the inner shell) and drive the body material opacity mask from the equipped pieces. Cutting the body per outfit breaks morphs and multiplies the asset count. Masking alone will not fix poke-through if the armour border is not weighted like the skin under it. Add a pose-space corrective on the two or three worst attacks instead of refitting the whole set.
Keep the import setting you already found: Use Mesh Bone Proportions, or the garment is retargeted onto the shared MetaHuman base and flies off when posed. In engine, drive the armour with Set Leader Pose Component on the MetaHuman body so you are not maintaining a second AnimBP. Helmets and bracers can stay single-bone or socket attached. Only the close shell needs the full transfer.
Garment Tool is still useful after the mesh has been conformed, for skinning touch-up and the hide mask. It is the wrong tool to expect a shape fit from.