Hey everyone,
I’ve been looking for a decent way to customize MetaHumans in Blender for ages, got fed up, and ended up building my own add-on for it. It’s called Skalin MetaMorph, and honestly I’m pretty happy with how it is coming along.
It does the full round trip. Import a .dna, edit the meshes, joints, blendshapes, and correctives in Blender, write it back out, load it in Unreal. No Maya anywhere.
There’s a free beta version you can grab right now, and a full version I’m still polishing. I’d love some help testing that one.
Features
Everything marked Free is in the free build. Everything marked Pro is what I’m putting behind the paid version.
DNA
- Import any MetaHuman
.dnaand build the character in Blender - Free - Export back to a valid
.dna- Free - Synchronize operator, pushes mesh edits into the DNA definition - Free
- Normals written to DNA on every export + auto Calculate Custom Normals - Free
Meshes
- Edit head and body meshes with normal Blender tools - Free
- Conform custom meshes onto MetaHuman topology - Free
- LOD-aware handling - Free
- Secondary mesh conform (teeth, eyes, lashes) - Pro
- Symmetrize Edit Meshes via UV-mirror map - Pro
Faceboard/Control Rig
- The MetaHuman FaceBoard Control rig works in Blender - drive the face with the same controls you’d use in Unreal, and see the result live while you’re editing - Free
Blendshapes
- Author blendshapes in Blender, written straight into the DNA - Free
- Standardized naming so the UE morph chain just resolves (
jaw_open→head_lod0_mesh__jaw_open, no manual wiring) - Free
RBF correctives
- Corrective pose editor - shapes driven by joint rotation - Pro
- Region and side filters - Pro
- Focused editing mode with Isolate Pose - Pro
- Revert pose / revert all with confirmations - Pro
Skeleton
- Joint editing with DNA write-back - Free
- Bone isolation / solo collections / Isolate Bones toggle - Pro
- FaceGroup hierarchy collections (makes ~800 face joints navigable) - Pro
- Edit-Mode Mirror Selected / Mirror All - Pro
- Mirror Pose L↔R - Pro
- Per-pair mirror using a proper per-joint basis transform, so body symmetry actually mirrors correctly - Pro
Materials
- Texture setup from your Maps folder - Free
- Per-part shader slot naming that survives the FBX round trip - Free
- Skin / Wireframe / Animated display modes - Pro
- Bundled topology wireframes - Pro
- Baked union masks - Pro
Mirroring and symmetry
Symmetry on a MetaHuman is deceptively hard. Naively flipping a joint across X gives you something that looks right until it deforms, because the left and right joints don’t share an orientation basis. MetaMorph mirrors through the actual per-joint basis transform, so what you get back is correct rather than approximately correct. That runs through everything:
- Bones Edit-Mode Mirror Selected / Mirror All, and per-pair mirroring that holds up under deformation - Pro
- Blendshapes and poses Mirror Pose L↔R, so you sculpt one side of a corrective and get the other for free - Pro
- Meshes Symmetrize Edit Meshes via UV-mirror map, which survives asymmetric topology edits - Pro
In practice, it means you sculpt half a face or half a body and the other half follows. It’s the single biggest time saver in the tool.
Compatibility
- Blender 5.2+
- UE 5.6+ should work, but I’ve only tested 5.7. My whole pipeline is verified end to end on 5.7 including RBF poses driving in-engine. 5.6 I genuinely don’t know yet.
- Windows. Other platforms untested.
One gotcha: on UE import set Normal Import Method = Import Normals, or you throw away all the normals work.
Free version
Download: SkalinMetaMorph - Free - Google Drive
Install as a Blender extension, point the bindings folder preference at your DNA location, done.
Beta testing
If you want the full version, email me at victorskalin@gmail.com and I’ll send a build over.
Mainly hoping for:
- Other engine versions, especially 5.6 and anything past 5.7
- Characters that aren’t mine — odd proportions, heavy custom topology
- Secondary mesh conform results, that’s the roughest part right now
- Anything that breaks, with console output if you can grab it
No forms, no NDA, nothing formal. Break it and tell me how. Beta testers keep the full version free for good once it releases.
What’s a fair price?
This is the bit I actually want opinions on.
I need to make some money from it (it’s been a lot of evenings) but I want it to be something a solo dev or a student can just buy without thinking about it too hard. I’d rather sell it cheap to a lot of people than expensive to a few.
So: what would you pay for this? What feels fair, and what feels like too much? Perpetual or updates-included? I have a number in my head, but I’d rather hear yours first.
Known issues, up front
- Windows only so far
- Secondary mesh conform is the least finished part
- It writes to DNA files. Work on copies
Happy to answer anything in the thread. If something is missing that you’d need, say so, I can still add things.
I will be working on getting some video tutorials done shortly as well, explaining the full workflow.
/Victor