Why in the world aren’t the metahumans consistent between what we see in the website editor compared to its exported version in UE?
export settings: medium quality(tried matching the settings in the creator viewport?)
posed image one is from within the editor. is it cause the face isnt in an animated position and when i use livelink to animate the face this will change or is it a setting or a bug??
image two is what we are getting. ALSO i am not getting anywhere near close to this level of detail in unreal, it looks like a video game character from ps4 in ue5. dont see the point of creating three different forum topics so lets please answer all of my questions with the solutions i seek. thanks ahead of time.
makin a short video so i want video quality, not video game quality and im a stickler for super fine details so max quality as if it were going to a studio.
please tell me theres a way to fix this and what setting i need to change. also need to turn off lod settings or use max all the time, my meshes in the background are ps1 quality…
Hello,
I would say that the biggest issue here is probably not the model, but the lighting. Therefore the first step for good visual consistency would be to work on a level and lighting setup that is as close as possible to that of the online viewer/editor. The two biggest factors being :
1 - The direction of the main cast shadow (as seen being cast by the jaw to the neck and by the nose to the front plane of the face), and
2 - Making sure that your shadow and AO settings properly occlude things like nostrils, underside of the eyelids, and so on.
Once you get these two things figured out you’ll be able to have good visual consistency. I would also recommend to perform your lighting tests using some of the known MH presets as opposed to a custom one, as this would allow other users to compare results with you. For instance here is Tall Normal Weight Ettore placed in a custom UE4.26 level (as far as I am aware I don’t have any raytracing enabled) :
So the next logical step would be for you to grab the same MH character preset and throw him in your level to compare.
Also (and this is something that many tech-oriented CG artists do not realize), realistic/“cinematic” lighting often relies on reflectors and secondary light sources placed outside of the frame. In the case of a game that can be achieved by attaching a point light to the character controller for instance.
Your best point of entry to get a feel for that would probably be to pick up a used DSLR camera and practice photography/lighting IRL. Basically you need to train your eye for real world light behavior, as well as practice the tech to reproduce that. If you proceed the other way around (tech first) you’ll end up getting stuck.
its not the lighting, the facial structure is completely different. one is an american kid and the other is a oriental kid. lighting doesnt make that occur. its like its not loading the information correctly. ive also tried lighting in several different ways. the lighting in the website is basic single point lighting and there are several light sources in the scene. im known for my lighting expertise and skills so i know its not that. tho you are right lighting IS everything when it comes to cgi work. thanks anyways. anyone else have any other suggestions? what im possibly thinking is that the focal length of the camera is off but also noticed too that the focal length measurements are not real nor accurate in UE. other than some internal change during the time its generated in bridge the focal length of a camera could and does change facial structure. hence why phone photos typically look different from DSLR
p.s. this forum question was aparently edited prior to posting… i also need the quality to be the same and as you can see they are polar opposites… also i have disabled the LOD functionality as well in an attempt to solve the problem as the LOD system in UE(not part of the code for nanocore rendering system nor lumen) to see if that would fix it as well, nope.
Hello -
While they could be different (with morphed/sculpted information not coming through) I am honestly not convinced that this is the actual case. Only way to to know for sure would be to capture and overlay screenshots taken with a very long/narrow telephoto lens or ortho. Not sure if the online editor allows for that, but it is already near telephoto anways so that shouldn’t be hard to match in editor. While it is probably not a perfect analog to the real world I do find the UE camera system to be quite predictable in terms of lens simulation but perhaps you’ve run into something more specific than I did.
Also, exporting out extreme sculpts would let you see if the edits are indeed inconsistent after export. I personally can’t tell as I only use default MH faces.
Still curious to see Ettore exported and placed in your scene though.
i can simulate a 1000mm extreme telephoto and pretty much any other focal length, definately not true to as that 1000mm is set in more like 650 700mm but the margin does get larger the more extreme it is. it is predictable just not accurate(annoying but ill probably change that in the code and update the repository sometime i have time) mite export the other one you’re talking about. what it seems the most plausible is the focal length differences. but then we go to the quality problem between the website editor and the ue. ill research further and if when i fix ill update this thread with any code changes and or config changes i made to fix. any suggestion on the quality issue? we go from natural to video game look.
Well I’d hate to sound like a broken record but I don’t think I am seeing any drastic change in quality between the online editor and actual UE with the asset loaded in … Admittedly I somehow managed break the face material as it didn’t load up properly between projects, but after plugging back the textures I am getting these results on default Bernice :
I would assume that the difference in lips and skin color is just me not plugging in the original material asset. But besides that the results are very close imho, and that’s only using a single Rectlight and an image-based skylight …
you keep using the premade characters though, i am not. try creating a drastically different looking character in the website and export into ue5, then lets see. how is the background gray btw? should be skybox? also what version of ue are you using?
Of course ! The whole point is to eliminate variables so that the comparison starts on solid ground. These screenshots establish that it is possible to recreate the render quality of the online editor in regular UE, so that takes care of the quality question. Now it’s your turn to drop either of these two characters (Ettore, Bernice) in that interior scene of yours. Once that is confirmed to look consistent with the online editor to you, and your scene is reworked to display them at a quality that you find acceptable, then it will be time for you to look a the potential issue (if any) with the customized heads. I currently do not have the time to play with the online editor or wait for a custom asset generation and download. Unless you provide the downloaded zip with all the uassets of course.
And then there’s also the comparison you can do with ortho/telephoto renders.
For a grey BG I either assign a material to a plane or a sphere, or use a fog asset. The screenshots were taken in 4.26.
check this out, in case you are in question of the quality level of the room, was taken yesterday, i also do not have time to deal with bugs that are causing inconsistencies. rn im busy animating my character inside maya which renders it just fine… perhaps ill just use that instead cause honestly when i was on the UE development project and put the graphics system together among a couple others, was not expecting it to get destroyed as it had but oh well. seems like UE isnt reading data correctly as again it works fine in maya. here is my house with that room as well. if i have time later ill put those characters in and go from there. maybe upload your config file and i can see what if anything is different. not sure how if its in UE why the background is gray fyi.
