Available for download from Fab, this release bridges the gap between Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman Creator and Houdini, providing an easy way to get MetaHuman characters into Houdini and enhance them with complex animation and effects using Houdini’s powerful procedural tools. Using the new MetaHuman Character Rig HDA, artists are able to import and assemble the head, body, and textures of MetaHuman characters created in Unreal Engine using MetaHuman Creator.
MetaHuman for Houdini’s existing groom tools have also been updated. You can now create MetaHuman-compatible hairstyles directly on your specific MetaHuman character, enabling you to work in context and eliminating the need to roundtrip with Unreal Engine.
The MetaHuman Character Rig HDA requires Houdini 21.0 or later.
While installing and testing, I notice that the MetaHumanForHoudini.msi file installs the package to Documents/houdini20.5
however above you mention it’s for 21.0 or higher. However, with the package in 20.5 it won’t actually appear in 21.0
Easy fix (for those reading) is to copy the Documents/houdini20.5/packages/MetaHumanForHoudini.json file to Documents/houdini21.0/packages/ folder (create folders if needed)
Thank you for the release, importing Metahumans into Houdini is amazing. Is there a workflow for taking the facial animation out of Unreal and into Houdini?
I’ve tried exporting the facial animation controls out of Unreal, but it’s not clear how I could take that and import it to the rig controls in Houdini.
Thanks for updating the plugin for H21. I found that using the Apex Configure Controls node allows to override and use different shapes for the controls for the rig. I’m currently trying to figure out if there’s a IK switch or whether there’s something else to display it and/or set it up manually for the rig. By default the arms and leg controls seem to use FK, but I’m unsure if there’s an IK setup that’s supported with the HDA.
Any help or resources about it would be greatly appreciated.
While this provides excellent opportunities for _importing_ .dna files, creating custom grooms for Metahuman characters and exporting those back out as .abc to be used as grooms in Unreal, it’s not clear to me whether or not there is an intended SOP node workflow in place (or planned?) to allow for editing the face topology, rig and subsequent authoring of modified .dna files.
In my specific use case, we would like to export a .dna from the Metahuman creator tool, make some modifications to the face topology and rig in Houdini, and re-export those as new .dna files to use as Morph Targets in the engine. The research I have turned up suggests that this pipeline would require the use of the Metahuman DNA Calibration Python library
I haven’t found anything specifically Houdini-related for this. I can only hope/assume that the same results could be achieved using Python SOPs, but wondered if there were plans to incorporate this functionality into the Metahuman for Houdini toolkit somehow?
