I’ve changed the source code and the old problem went away, but now there is something strange happening: The newly imported characters have many randomly distorted parts all over the body:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve…mport-question
Only the newly imported skeletal meshes have this, not the old ones (from before the source code change), so it has something to do with the import and the changed source code. Some hidden inter-dependencies?
Here is what I did:
In Engine/Source/Editor/UnrealEd/Private/Factories/SkeletalMeshImport.cpp I changed const float MINWEIGHT = 0.01f, to const float MINWEIGHT = 0.001f;
You’re right that I should change the topology, but it’s not that simple and I need characters with even skin. Smooth/even skin with a broad range of animations is only possible with precise weight painting. (I need a close up view of the characters all the time for super realism in my FPS/TPS kind of game)
I’m using MakeHuman and have established a fast reliable workflow for bringing different characters from MH over Blender to UE4 and I need a reliable topology quality and can’t afford to change and fine-tune everything manually with different and unreliable results.
The best way would be to change the topology in makehuman directly, but I don’t know how difficult it is or if it is that simple (vertex count/order, compatibility with targets and clothes).
The mesh subdivision is a temp (it comes at a cost of around 137k tris for a “naked” character mesh) and fast solution to overcome the need for a “next gen” topology while keeping a fast workflow and mostly a fairly realistic result (and it’s only being used for the highest level of detail, so no big deal if you use it only for a few main characters on the scene). UE4 has a LOD creation feature, that works very well for the most part (and I can still import my own lods from blender).
In short/medium term something will have to be done about the outdated topology of the makehuman characters for achieving better deforming bodies “out of the box”, which don’t need too many vertices/tris and are optimized for Dual Quaternion Skinning.
With the current topology even weight painting has its limits and the bone influence distribution isn’t optimized as well. But it’s very difficult to make a new topology if you don’t have real knowledge about anatomy and realistic deformations.