How to disable Metahuman blend shapes in Unreal Engine?

Hi! Me and my team are trying to use Metahumans in the game on low LOD settings, because we don’t need super realistic face animations for them. Despite that, when we place couple of them in a level they use a lot of performance, no matter what LOD level we apply. Is there an option to permanently disable some or all of the Metahuman blend shapes?

Ok, There is an option to disable morph target in the head skeletal mesh menu, but also there is an option to disable skin cache which I guess makes something similar in effect.

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Hi there,

If disabling the skin chache doesn’t work, you can also disable the animation blueprint for the face mesh, or even delete all curves from the head skeleton (destructivel.

But the real question is… why use metahumans if you don’t want to?
If you are looking for performance, definitely do not use metahumans.
Deactivating post-process anim bp is not going to change too much…

It’s a good point, but MH was promoted as optimized for mobile. I haven’t tested myself other optimization options, but I recall playing a game with 4 LOD1 metahuman in the level really dropped performance. So I am sure there are ways to improve FPS. For instance, if you examin the City Crowd Sample, there’s an option to use hair cards instead of particles for all LODs, which is also great for improving performance of NPCs.

Yeah they said :joy:

This is the best option, but “not compatible” with metahumans

In this case, I think the solution is to export meshes of lod X to FBX
Then Import in a new project as skeletal + mesh
In that case we are avoiding all variables, settings and plugins

That should do it.

We will use face mocap for those characters, but we are fine with the result made without most of the blend shapes. Deleting them in UE, even just one, makes the software crash. When I export a Metahuman from Maya to UE all the blend shapes, regardless if I delete them or not, are not functional in UE. I am exporting and importing with blend shapes options turned on. Turning off the skin cache for particular Metahuman head skeletal mesh makes the facial lines jagged. Turning off certain blend shapes in the morph target list in UE does not disable them completely, and the skin cache is still working in the background regardless of the LOD. Disable casting to lower LOD’s option is on. I wonder how it could work on Android if the skin cache is still working on LOD4, or 5. What changes when post process anim BP is deactivated?

@unrealfilip I have bad news for you, I was thinking about morphs and lod… I was thinking it cannot be…

And exactly there is no morph in LOD>0
lod4

We are talking about vertex group which are no shapes… are bone influences!
metahunman

So what is doing the post-process is to translate the info of the morphs to the bones!


(They are f* genious!)
Then the weight is like 0.00001kb?

Review it, because this is how it looks the LOD you are talking about…
image

At this moment I’m not sure if is possible to remove the LOD 0 (and the morphs)

Take a look because this is not what you are thinking the lod 4/5 not even has eyes O_o :smiley:

I decided to remove blend shapes in Maya manually. It helped for the performance drastically. I’ve gained more than 20 fps. Also I’ve edited groom assets and removed all the strands in favor of cards, and removed fuzz for extra fps. Animated faces on LOD1 look decent, depending on the light.

It sounds better!