MetaHuman Crowd Collection Generates White/Untextured Heads

Development Character & Animation
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Newly created MetaHuman Crowd Collections generate MetaHuman Instances with white/untextured heads. This reproduces in a clean project with a newly created MetaHuman Character, so it does not appear related to migration or custom assets.

The generated face material instances use placeholder baked textures such as T_Flat_Grey_C, T_Flat_Black_M, T_Flat_N, and T_Flat_White_C, instead of character-specific baked face textures.

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Is there a required setup step missing for baking face textures in custom MetaHuman Crowd Collections?

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Steps to Reproduce

  • Create a new UE 5.8 project with MetaHuman Character/Crowd plugins enabled.
  • Create a new MetaHuman Character.
  • Create a new MetaHuman Crowd Collection from that character.
  • Build/generate the Collection and create a MetaHuman Instance.
  • Open the Instance or spawn it through Mass Crowd.
  • The head renders white/untextured, and the generated face material uses placeholder baked inputs.
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Hi, sorry for the delay getting back to you on this. Our offices have been closed for the last couple of weeks so we’re just in the process of catching up.

Thanks for reporting this, I’ve been able to reproduce it. It appears to be a bug with the head item setup when using the crowd character pipeline when a pre-existing mesh asset isn’t specified for the head. It looks like when you don’t specify an existing asset, the materials that are generated for the mesh aren’t applied correctly.

You should be able to work around this by specifying your existing mesh for your character here:

[Image Removed]Let me know if that gets things working for you, and I’ll continue looking into what’s going wrong when the mesh isn’t specified.

Thanks,

Euan

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Hi Matthias, I’ve spoken to the dev team and investigated this further, but it looks like any fix won’t be trivial to implement. The dev team has also recommended that specifying the mesh assets within the pipeline is actually the desired workflow because it’ll make building the collections significantly quicker, and it means that the generated materials will be simpler. So for now, you should continue to manually specify these assets. I’ve created a bug to track this issue so you can see when it eventually gets resolved.

Thanks,

Euan

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Hello Euan,

this workflow works for now, thanks!

Best regards,

Matthias

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