Metahuman Outfit Smear in Animation

Hi there, I’m kind of desperate and frustrated, hope somebody knows what I’m talking about and can help me.

I recently purchased a Metahuman outfit for a soldier, I placed him in the world, created some animations with Mixamo and brought it back for the cinematic.

What happens next is what you see in the pictures. I think the mesh is “smeared” and ruins the entire shot. I have no clue why, and I have done some research into the matter:

  1. I seem to be the only one who suffers from it. Not the Fab Staff, my Unreal instructor, his friends and the creator are able to to replicate the issue.
  2. It is not a matter of leaky clothes. There’s barely one millimeter of revealed skin under the left thumb. I solved that with Dynamic Sculpting, it didn’t influence anything of note.
  3. I switched to a different Metahuman Outfit, the Snow Soldier one, which is made by a different creator, and this issue persists with that one too.
  4. While either naked or with Epic Games outfits, everything works fine.
  5. It is not a problem of TransferredSkinWeights.
  6. When I compared the outfit with the Epic Games free outfit, there were no visible differences, except for the outfits importing skeletal meshes to the collection in the cloth asset, while the epic games cloth used static meshes. When I tried switching to those, the meshes were imported without their materials and I was unable to add it.
  7. When testing the animation, the smear happens whether in rendering, preview, or in the blueprint viewport.
  8. The smear remains until I change the angle/transform of the camera by wiggling it until the screen is refreshed, but it keeps happening.

Any help would be appreciated. Please let me know if there is anything I should mention to help with the troubleshooting.

I’m happy to report I solved the problem.

This is an LOD issue with the blueprints. By entering LODsync in the MH BP Components, go to the details and look at “Forced LOD” set the value to 1.

Source of the solution is in this question:

Metahuman animation Cloth error when camera is far! (#animation #Metahuman UE4-27-2)

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