I basically followed this workflow to use a metahuman i created in Metahuman creator:
The normal metahuman seems to work so far and animates with the ALS motions.
Now i built some custom clothes in blender and transferred the weights to the Metahuman Base Mesh to get it working with the Metahuman skeleton.
The coat is set as the skeletal mesh for the “Torso” component of the Metahuman.
Now if i move the character the cloth moves ok at start but then starts to bug out and does strange movements. I made a video showcasing the issue here.
I tested the cloths in blender by posing some bones and there everything looks OK. I then also applied the clothes to the basic UE5 third person mannequin and also there the movements look good. This leads me to think the buggy movements have something to do with the retargeting that is done from the Metahuman Skeleton to the ALS one.
I would be very happy to get some help, maybe someone here has seen similiar effects and can help me fix this.
Thanks in advance and best regards,
Julius (Forge of Fantasy)
Looks like your masterpose component link is off (the name of changed in ue5 just because epic hates its users).
Likely - the iasue is noth the cloth, but the skeletal animation.
Your cloth paint - particularly in that area - shpuld be 0.
As in - it does not simulate at all but rather follows the vertrx of the mesh as defined by the animation.
In the first step I do want the cloth (coat) to follow the vertices by animation since I am rather new to Unreal and did not work with a real cloth simulation yet.
But my problem is that the retargeting from the ALS skeleton (this uses the UE4 one) to the Metahuman skeleton does not work properly.
I hope you can see this in the video, look at 0:26 seconds for example. Once the character jumps on the railing the vertices of the coat are all over the place.
The retargeting is done with a “Retarget pose from mesh” node that uses an IK-Retargeter and then in the construction script of the character blueprint the body component of the Metahuman is set as the leader pose component and the cloth components should follow it.
I made another video with the ALS-Character mesh visible. The blue one is the UE4 target for that the animations were made for, and the other one (green coat) is the Metahuman mesh that gets retargeted.
Edit: Here are the retarget settings, just in case there is something set wrong.
If it works, then the problem is the paint or paint related.
If it doesn’t, then like you say the retargeting is off/bad.
There are way too many bones in metahuman to make heads or tail of it without going hands on, but at least you know that is what you need to fix.
In general, I would never use runtime retargeting unless the coat needs to support vastly different characters (and even then, really, I would rather duplicate the model and weight paint it to the proper extra bones so that the motion is perfect and not some sort of engine driven approximation even if Control Rig can help).
If you set it up right, you simply retarget the skeleton of the coat to the skeleton of the character;
During the process, you set up the bone associations manually / or rather you throughly reviewiew the values the engine chose for you.
If cloth paint is not the issue then the retargeting uses a wrong bone for the upper arms.
Refer to the old stuff for what things should work like
The thing is that I have to use the runtime retargeting. It is not done to make the cloth follow the Metahuman but to make the Metahuman and Coat (UE5 metahuman Skeleton) follow the UE4 skeleton used in the Advanced Locomotion System that I use.
The alternative if I understood correctly would be to retarget the animations (All of them, there are a lot in ALS) one time and then use the Metahuman Asset and not the ALS one with runtime retargeting.
I tried this once but it did not work property (maybe it was my fault, the retargeting stuff is not easy).
Maybe the tutorial you send me brings some light into this, I will take a look. Thanks for the link
They changed engine stuff around, so naming and old tutorials are a bit of a mess to think of in relation to ue5 - but the under the hood stuff is still identical.
So if you understand that, then you can likely find the proper UE5 way.
You are better off not using metahumans. And that goes for anyone making anything except cinematics.
Take the metahuman to blender or something.
Place in the ue4 mannequin skeleton.
Adjust bone LENGTH only. Unparent the meta human armature.
Parent the UE4 one to the mesh.
Rename the bone vertex gropus to match the new bone names.
As you go through you will get a ton of vertex gropus for wierd bones which you can likely delete.
Yes, you are almost better off deleting the whole thing and making your own weight painted mesh…
The more you cut it down, the better it will work, retarget and perform.
10 can likely spend 10 hours sorting out gropus and info to remove out of MH mesh.
On the other hand it takes about a week to make a mesh and weight paint it correctly by hand if you are good at it.
Anyway, the end result should be a mesh that uses the UE4 skeleton and can therefore be easily retargeted (same bone names, no guess work).
Because you only changed translations/bone positions, most animations will also just work OK by doing something silly like using the existing skeleton on import.
Not suggesting for anyone to do that ever - but its possible to preview things that way should one be so inclined to temporarily skip the retargeting bit.
If you did all of that, you will effectively have removed the need for metahumans in your character. Making things a lot more funcional all around…
