You should make a topic about material optimizations specifically. I’d give you my 2c on it.
So would may others.
And on that - many, if not all marketplace assets are just really, really bad. This is mostly because they are thought of as Modular Player characters more often than not…
A character which isn’t modular or ever going to change, should really never have more than 1 material slot, For instance…
Another thing that can easily be optimized is probably the Character’s UVs.
Very likely also the amout of Textures used in full resolution to achieve clothing on them.
The problem is that in UFN you probably have 0 control over these.
And that MetaHumans probably also offer 0 control over these…
When you make your own custom character meshes keeping your ducks in a budgeted row becomes bery trivial in comparison 