Meta Human took a big step backwards

When meta human first came out i played with it on the web. it was intuitive and it allowed very quick iteration of facial and body creation.

I have recently come back to looking at making both a male and female character for my game. I have UE5.6 installed, so i downloaded the core and enabled the plugins. But on my PC it is dog slow and it complains that just one character has exceeded the GPU memory requirements. (I have a 1060ti 4GB.) I’m not surprised it is slow, i have UE5 running which is itself bloated, but it surprises me that the GPU memory budget for a single character is so extreme.

It also looks like the number of models to use as references is much smaller than before.

I have looked at reallusion CC and in comparison it works so much smoother. It also seems to give me more control on anatomical features. And I can import it into blender as FBX and from there move it to my game engine as GLTF.

Am I missing something, or has meta human become more cumbersome to work with since the web portal went away?

Well it’s kinda opinion-based but yeah the local MHC has massive memory requirements. It’s fine on the €2K desktop I have but it’s definitely not usable on any machine.

It usually helps, before rigging and assembling the character, to close and reopen the UE project, somehow it usually frees 2-10GB or RAM…

I do think the RAM and GPU requirements are justified, metahuman rigging hides a ton of complexity: procedural wrinkle maps, complex blend shapes, adaptive wardrobe with cloth sim support, etc.