I imagine there woud be a whole lot more users of unreal metahumans if the whole metahuman process wasn’t so unintuitive. Specifically mocap, but also custom clothes. Here’s some ideas:
- Make a large range of standard mocap animations for the metahumans so that users don’t have to go around trying to source them elsewhere, which is a horrible process. Walk, run, grab, use phone, that sort of thing. Ideally these should be in the engine content. If not, a library in fab which imports and automatically works. Maybe one that creators can add their own animations to on Fab.
- There needs to be a standardised mocap source for Manny and Mannequin, some method of standardising things so that you are not left with horrible process of sourcing external mocap. Importing mixamo just doesn’t work, because you try to upload Manny and it takes around 5 or six goes to work, the result is some weird messed up animation- there are a hundred reasons why it could be messed up. The import dialogue starts to fail then you watch loads of youtube videos telling you wrong information, there is no real support on the forums. Why is this so hard in 2025? The only way to get it to work is using Mixamo Converter. Hats off to them for creating this, but it should not be necessary.
- The retargeting is much better but surely that is just fixing a problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
- Provide a standardised system so that creators on fab can make clothes, mocap, etc and it will automatically import to your unreal metahuman via fab. Currently you purchase mocap and clothing for your metahumans and that is the beginning of a horrible journey wasting huge amounts of time and essentially increasing the urge just to make it with AI! It just turns everyone off metahumans.
- Provide a comprehensive Epic Games youtube tutorial with detailed step by step explanations of how to animate and control Metahumans in sequencer with control rig and animation sequences derived from external sources, eg mixamo, using different clothing setups, derived from external sources for each character. For example making a short narrative cinematic from scratch. Many of the tutorials out there teach you hacks which cause problems down the line.
Metahumans are so powerful and obviously great if you have a team of devs or a month to set up a single character. But I just feel they could be a real way in to Unreal for non-game creators, if it weren’t for the crazy stumbling blocks which make their use extremely inefficient.