Hello.
When wearing shoes with various sole heights, such as high heels, on a metahuman, I have a question about the difficulty in creating a metahuman whose shoes or feet do not dig into the floor.
The conditions for the metahuman characters we are trying to create are set as follows.
Condition 1. Create a metahuman that maintains the rotation values of the foot (foot_l, foot_r) and toes (ball_l, ball_r) bones as they are, so that there are no problems in playing, evaluating, or calculating animations on skeletal meshes that share the metahuman’s body skeleton (metahuman_base_skel).
Condition 2. Create a character that uniformly adjusts the pelvis and all of its descendant bones according to the shoe height, so that the shoes do not go through the floor or float above the floor when worn.
Condition 3. Even if the shoes of various metahumans are replaced with Metahuman Creator or Mutable, the above conditions 1 and 2 are maintained.
In addition, to find out if there is a direction or recommended solution pursued by Epic Games, I checked three official sample projects.
MetaHumans Project
- When the metahuman blueprint class (BP_Ada, BP_Taro) in the MetaHumans sample project was placed on a random floor, it was confirmed that it dug into the ground as much as the sole of the shoe.
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CitySample Project
- Both crowd and player character BP were calculated using IK in the animation blueprint to adjust the pelvis position so that the soles or feet do not dig into the ground.
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Mutable Sample
- After checking the Customizable Object (CO_Character), the skeletal mesh of the foot part was replaced with one of the meshes of boots, shoes, and none (bare feet), but the height of the pelvis bone or the positions of the foot and ball bones did not change.
- When replacing the skeletal mesh of boots or shoes with one of the meshes, the foot part is replaced with the shoe mesh, and in this process, the changes in the length of the shin and the thickness of the foot are hidden.
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After checking the official samples above, I decided that two methods can be considered as solutions.
1. In the animation blueprint, use IK logic to move the pelvis bone along the z-axis by the height of the sole of the shoe. (City Sample project)
2. Replace the mesh of the foot part, allowing for slight changes in the length of the shin or the thickness of the foot in the invisible part covered by the shoe. (Mutable Sample project)
With the above two directions, it was difficult to respond to various cases, such as when creating metahumans with characters wearing various shoes with high soles, such as high heels.
Therefore, I would like to ask the following questions.
1. I wonder if Epic Games recommends one of the two directions mentioned above for creating a ‘metahuman that can respond to wearing shoes of various heights’, or if there is another direction that it pursues.
2. If there are any related official sample projects or learning materials that we have not confirmed, please let us know.
3. If possible, I think it would be a great help in conveniently creating more diverse characters if the metahuman creator in Unreal Engine itself could adjust the height of the metahuman according to the shoe height. If you are considering this direction, I would appreciate it if you could let me know.
Best regards.