Hi,
We’re trying to give the user the possibility to customize their Metahuman avatar facial feature or bodyshape at runtime, and we’re aiming to modify the neutral position of the bones based on the Mutable modifications but we are having troubles with DNA not accepting our changes.
On 5.7 when Reshape Skeleton is enabled on the Mesh Reshape node, it does not affect the face at all while DNA is active on reference Skeletal Mesh.
However, if the DNA is removed from the head reference skeleton, the skeleton reshaping works correctly and the face updates as expected. It seems that the DNA may be overriding or preventing the facial skeleton transforms from being modified by the Mesh Reshaper node (The AnimNode_RigLogic apply the neutral values stored in the DNA to the skeletal mesh.).
Also, when the character is baked and then you remove DNA from the that baked character, the morphs applied by Mutable do seem to remain applied to the character.
What is the recommendation to edit/update/merge DNA from inside Mutable ?
Creating utility nodes to help modifying this data from the Mutable modifications or Mutable giving us a solution to actualize DNA based on a Boolean attribute in the DNA node ?
Could the 5.5 Metahuman DNA calibration tools be leveraged in some way to help on that topic ?
Is there examples of character face customization within Unreal we could have access to ?
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Hi, unfortunately, merging meshes that use DNA isn’t currently supported with Mutable. Mutable will pass through the existing DNA asset, but it’ll no longer be valid for the mesh after modifications. This issue has come up quite a few times before, so the Mutable team is aware of the request to better support merging and/or blending of DNA assets. But at the moment, they don’t have a specific timeline for when any support in that area would be added. What most licensees have been doing instead is merging the body mesh parts and keeping the face mesh separate. We have a crowd sample that’s being released with 5.8 that shows a MH-specific solution for character composition so that may be of interest to you once it’s available.
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Thanks for your answer !
Our question was maybe to broad, currently we’re looking for a solution to update the DNA neutral bone data with bone transform modifications defined by the mutable graph.
For example : We would be to have bodytype sliders (height, morphology, etc) available in Mutable as a character editor and those change would impact the skeleton. So we would update the DNA of the body or head via Mutable and use it on a Metahuman asset.
We will take a look at the crowd sample from 5.8 as soon as it’s available.
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It sounds like you would want to do all of this at runtime, is that correct? Currently, it’s not possible to edit DNA data at runtime; it’s a fixed asset that’s only really compatible with the mesh & skeleton that it was authored against. Any changes to those assets invalidate the related DNA. This is one reason why merging/blending of DNA assets via Mutable isn’t supported at the moment. The main workflow for modifying mesh and DNA is outside of the engine, via the Metahuman for Maya plugin (or previously via the DNACalib library). But that doesn’t help in terms of a runtime solution, unfortunately.
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