Is there a streamlined process to take the MetaHuman rig and apply it to characters that are super stylized and with different typology? I noticed they showed off KiteBoy for their MetaHuman Animator demo, but I have yet to see someone apply the rig to super cartoony character. Any ideas? Is this possible. Maybe even taking a Maya Advanced Skeleton Character and converting it to a MetaHuman rig. Would love to hear people’s insight into this!
bump that. also intressted in some tutorial how to transfer the animator talking stuff to cartoony/animal heads .
The Kiteboy model is using (mostly) blendshapes, hard-sculpted into the model, and driven by LiveLink ARKit channels with some post processing in BP.
Metahumans can also be driven indirectly by these channels, but the face models actually get deformed by a multitude of surface bones.
Therefore, even though it Kiteboy can be driven by LiveLink, it isn’t compatible with the blendshape-less workflow of Animator. Unless it is recreated through MeshToMH, of course.
description of new metahuman mesh
New Mesh to MetaHuman workflow for custom characters
This release isn’t just about MetaHuman Animator, however. We’ve also expanded Mesh to MetaHuman so you can now directly set the template mesh point positions.
Mesh to MetaHuman performs a fit that enables it to use any topology, but this necessarily approximates the volume of your input mesh. With this release, you can set the template mesh and, provided it strictly adheres to the MetaHuman topology, you will get exactly that mesh rigged—not an approximation.
In tandem with the DNA Calib ability to set the neutral pose for mesh and joints, this empowers experts to quickly zero in on custom characters.
Havent figured out yet if I have to go through Maya or if there is a way to directley retoplogize the template directley and that will be enuf to make a vaild metahuman.
I’m imagining super stylized characters that almost have no humanoid features, with that level of Metahuman Animator fidelity. Like this
I would also like to know how to get stylized characters with Metahuman face rigs. I don’t want to pay for Maya, and the Mesh to Metahuman workflow always results in a cartoon face with photorealistic skin and preset hair styles. It’s uncanny, like looking at “untooned” artwork.
My dream would be to have a cartoony character that can be animated with the Metahuman Animator workflow.
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This tutorial for building custom, stylized Metahumans is excellent, although it requires the paid Mesh Morpher plug-in.
I actually didn’t realize that Mesh To Metahuman would take a Metahuman mesh and use it exactly rather than making a smoothed approximation. This would greatly simplify the workflow in the link above and eliminate the need for a paid plug-in. However, I haven’t been able to get that to work, and posted here: New Mesh to MetaHuman workflow for custom characters
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There are a couple of newer solutions for this:
- MetaPipe: you do need the latest versions of Maya for this though. My understanding is that this “wraps” your custom character around a UE Metahuman rig allowing the rig to work with your own custom character.
- Character Creator with CC control rig which is Metahuman rig compatible. If you have Character Creator (paid), you can download this free plugin which can create the rig for any CC character you import or create. Since CC can import Daz models, this may be a solution if you are a Daz user.
It seems to me the latter is simpler, but you do need Character Creator and know how to use it as well.
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