Importing Metahumans from Maya

Development Asset Creation
1

Hey,

Did anybody succesfully export from Bridge to Maya and than imported the asset from Maya in Unreal without any issues with joins, bones, etc?

I have succesfully created a blend shape for a specific expression, but I am unable to get the export right so it would not break my mesh inside unreal. Bones and joints are wrong or missing, even though the export settings are set to default and should not be doing this.

Also, the export combined all the LOD meshes into a single one, only way for me to export it succesfully was to delete the other LOD levels.

Any help welcome.

2

I noticed that the face mesh that gets exported out of Maya has a different number of facial morphs, bones and vertices than the facial mesh that exists in Unreal. Both are exported from Quixel in the exact same way.

3

Yes, the assets imported into maya and UE are quite different.

  1. Fixing bones requires to add root → pelvis → spine_01 → spine_02 → spine_03.
  2. Fixing blendshapes requires renaming all blendshapes with a prefix (so bs names in engine and exporting mesh match). For all meshes that contain blendshape node.
  3. You may need to import models directly to LODs, separately.
  4. Vertex order gets scrambled (there’s also different vert count for some reason, need to look into that later) so Groom binds need to be fixed as well. Which is another type of pain but possible.
  5. btw, you have to reimport meshes to already existing asset, because there is no in-editor way to add dna data to skelmesh. Duplicating mesh and working on it is ok.

Currently I’m trying to figure out why vertex normals are geting borked (especially noticable on eyelids when blinking), so any insight on how to fix it would be good. There are probably some other caveats that I didn’t notice yet, but it works (mostly).

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