MetaHuman Parametric Outfits – Can I Preserve Custom Skin Weights from Maya?

Development Character & Animation
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Hi everyone,

I’m creating MetaHuman clothing for Fab using UE 5.8.

I’ve already skinned my clothing in Maya, manually refined the weights using ngSkinTools, and successfully tested it with different animations in Unreal Engine.

Now I want to convert it into a Parametric Outfit, but Epic’s documented workflow uses TransferSkinWeights, which seems to replace my carefully adjusted weights.

My questions:

  1. Can I preserve my custom Maya skin weights when converting a Skeletal Mesh into a Parametric Outfit?

  2. If not, can I manually refine the skin weights inside the Parametric Outfit with bone-level control?

  3. How do Fab sellers offer clothing that’s both properly skinned for animation and compatible with Parametric MetaHumans?

  4. Are they actually providing two separate versions of each garment — a manually skinned Skeletal Mesh and a separate Parametric Outfit — or is there a workflow that combines both?

I’d really appreciate any guidance from artists experienced with MetaHuman clothing production.

Thanks!