I’m trying to use the ML Deformer applied to metahuman head geometry, but it’s affecting all the components of the face - teeth, eyes, lashes etc. Even when the geocache only contains the head geometry, after training it still is altering the other parts of the face. I’m using the Vertex Delta Model with 5.4, which despite not being recommended is the only model I can actually get to work. I tried isolating the bones to exclude the eyes etc, it has no impact.
In 5.2 I tested with essentially the same configuration without any issues, I never saw it affect the other geometries beside the head.
The head itself is deforming correctly and it looks great. Anyone have a clue how to solve this?
Hi, sorry for the late reply, I just noticed the post after being off the forums for a while.
There were some issues in 5.4 with PyTorch that could fail the training. But if it does something that might not be the problem.
If your geometry cache only contains the face it should not deform say the eyes or teeth for sure. It will only generate morph targets for the vertices inside the geometry cache. Can it be that the meshes changed? Like the vertex order change in either the alembic or fbx?
What it internally does (assuming “Flatten Tracks” is disabled during geom cache import) is that it will find the mesh with the same name for each mesh in your source skeletal mesh asset.
For example if you have the following mesh names in your skeletal mesh Fbx file / maya scene:
Face
Eyes
Teeth
And your Geom cache contains a track named something like:
Face
Then the eyes and teeth should get ignored. And it should only try to match the vertices of the face mesh. The vertex count and vertex order has to match for the face mesh in that case. Otherwise it would apply the wrong delta to the wrong vertex.
That’s why it sounds very weird that it touches the teeth and eyes. It can always be a bug of course. Especially if it worked in 5.2. But we haven’t seen this yet here internally.
Is there perhaps a way you could try in 5.5?
The Neural Morph Model with default settings should work well in 5.5 as well. It might be worth to retry that. I changed some default settings to make it more likely to look good on the first pass (although not best perf or memory wise).
Did you also try to reimport the assets just to be sure?
Everything I tried failed to solve the issue with the Vertex Delta model, so my guess is that it’s a bug.
However, I tried again with Neural Morph and got it to work by setting the compression and vertex delta threshold to 0.
The result is pretty good, I trained it with 4D data and it definitely enhances the realism. It’s a shame there isn’t more documentation or instances of people using this, I understand it’s somewhat experimental but it seems like there is huge potential.
But I agree there should be some more videos and some marketing about it.
We see more studios starting to use it now. Once those projects ship for sure we will also be able to talk more about how it was used in those games etc.
