I’m at an impasse. I’ve figured out how to get a metahuman to fully animate using FaceWare for the face and purchased animations from the Marketplace for the body (took a week, but I got it!). It looks great. But the memory performance is inconceivably bad.
I’ve spent all day searching for solutions, but I’m not sure what the proper terminology is to get the answer.
My goal is either:
Use a less demanding mesh that has a separate body and facial skeleton (in which case, where do I get one? Preferably directly compatible with the Epic Skeleton. I tried using a couple of the free Paragon characters, but that all have a single skeleton; riggable faces, yes, but not separate, which I need.)
or
Increase the performance of the MetaHumans by removing bones and functions which @MostHost_LA has suggested, but, as someone who doesn’t model, seems to be a very labor-intensive and temperamental process.
Number of curves (morphs).
Number of bones.
Number of textures within all meshes.
Etc, becuase theres probably another 40 things to list individually that matter to it.
If you want to do this scientifically, you record with the profiler, and drill down to see what is taking up what.
If you want to wing it, and guess that the metahuman bones are the problem (which they most likely are).
You can test it by forcing the metahuman to a lower LOD - assuming they are correctly set up to discard bones like they should be.
Since the bones are now “virtual” though, this may absolutely do nothing for memory.
However you can use the metahuman LOD bone list to remove the bones off the skeleton alltogether, and re-import a clean metahuman to replace the skeleton.
There is no real modeling skill involved here, just the ability to delete bones, save as FBX, import, and re-target if needed.
Ps: on 1, try MakeHuman if its still around. But you do need skills for both modeling and weight painting to get it to work nicely. Its not that easy at all, it’s essentially character creation. Thanks to metahumans, soon to be a lost art.