Am I just a moron? I bought a 3d model of a human from the marketplace, I download it from the fab window, and it downloads some textures and materials and no skeletal mesh or anything that can be dragged on screen.
I manually downloaded the fbx and imported it and then it doesn’t have textures or materials. So I download the textures folder too, and now I have to map everything to the asset. I put all the materials on and some of them work and some don’t, so I try to edit the material and attach the skin to the base color and it makes them the default grey color in-engine.
Am I brain dead? Or did I get scammed and this is a half baked product that only a 3d modeling artisan could correctly import?
I’m trying to control my anger at my lack of knowledge and ability on this and it’s very upsetting. Thanks for listening, any help would be appreciated.
Been at this for 3 hours now. 20 minutes since initial post.
Status update: The fab download has the materials I need for the 3d model but I have to manually download the fbx just to get the skeletal mesh then add the materials onto it from the fab download. That worked except the fab download is missing 6 of the materials, most importantly the skin, so my character is made of marshmallow color.
Now I’m trying to play with the other downloaded folders to see if I can piece together how to put together the skin from this labyrinth of garbage and then put it on the character. Not sure how to do it, the materials take like 3 things, but, for example, the arm skin has an ao, microN, micoNMask, ResourceMap_position, resourceMap_WSNormal, RGBAMask.tga, roughness, SSSMap, and TransMap.
I only know what to do with roughness, diffuse color (metallic), specular color, and base color. So the fact that there’s more than 4 things means that I’m probably going to be stuck here for another few hours or possibly days punching my table, googling things, asking AI, and yelling at air lol.
Next status update. I’m painstakingly taking the textures and applying them to the materials. I had to manually download the blender file then export the fbx and import it with blank textures then torturously find the textures and add them to the material blueprints one by one.
As I was doing this, I’m less than 1 tenth of the way done after 10 minutes, I found that the normal maps are not right, if I put the body normal map on the body and the arm normal map on the arm then there’s this extremely obvious line where the two body parts meet. So yolo I guess this pile of garbage ships with no normal maps, I’m not good with 3d modeling so I have no idea where that will cause issues, but having such a blatant line on it like a barbie doll is going to be completely unacceptable.
Well back to work, I paid 40 dollars for a 5+ hour job of importing this crap, hopefully it’s even possible, I’ll report back.
I’ve not bought off FAB before but this process sounds less than fab…
NOT what I would expect to be hearing. My assumption, like other products I’ve purchased in the past, would be that some-assembly-required is not part of the product. I’d expect a level with the metahuman in it, with all the parts applied.
YOU having to make anything to even get to an example/demo state, is suspect. Unless you are just missing the obvious, sounds like a scammy-seller to be honest.
Okay so that makes me feel better knowing it was maybe just a 38 dollar scam, I think I might be able to use it though after hours of labor on this trash. This is what I’m currently up against, screenshot included. Manually fixing materials one by one.
Another status update. I got the skin done, now most of the other materials come in the download from FAB, so I swapped out those materials and it did the thing where if there’s not enough light the materials turn solid black. I’m not an expert but I remember something’s missing or something that causes that.
So in other words, no workarounds for me, I gotta go through all 20 materials and patch them up one by one. Unless someone comes in here and explains otherwise, I recommend never ever buying from this seller ever, either I’m stupid or this is just complete trash.
Just my opinion of-course. Since I have not used Metahuman extensively, I cannot say for sure what to expect insofar as an consumer-grade level product but again, generally, aside from using the parts provided to make levels, like sections of already textured/material-ed wall parts to build out a level, having to make those parts to begin with (like your metahuman apparently) is sus, to me.
Animation packs I’ve purchased in the past have a layout level, maniquin and animation blueprint provided, etc. Stuff is basically ready to go with minimal effort on my part. Asset-packs have similar and a sample-level, I wouldn’t expect to have to generate a sample material, unless I was going for my own logic, etc.
Having to make your model here sounds like, modeling in a way, something I would have expected to pay-for and get in the product.
Go look at the Paragon models from Epic. That is what I would expect in a character, except here, the additional specifics w/respect to metahuman.
well here’s my next update. I’m at the point now unless someone knows how I can export the perfectly normal version from blender into unreal engine without having to spend 100 hours learning 3d modeling to learn how to put all these complex textures back together, then I’m going to have to abandon it and see if I can get a refund.
I tried manually putting it all together and while it looked alright, the hair and especially the eyelashes were a deal breaker, and I couldn’t find any way to put it together with the materials to not make it look insanely messed up. I’m praying and hoping someone who knows 3d modeling comes in here and explains some magic way to go blender > unreal without spending 100 hours learning how this guy put his materials together in the blueprint, but if not it’s just over, I spent 40 dollars to lose an entire work day, what a great deal that was.
