I am struggling with conforming my metahuman to this stylized custom mesh (specifically the nose area). I previously have used a much more elaborate pipeline to do this successfully, but having heard about this new feature of custom mesh conform in 5.8, I got very excited to try it! I have seen someone use it on a stylized character made using Character Creator, however, notably, the stylized character in that case had proportions much closer to an actual real-life human, meanwhile mine is heavily exaggerated.
I think the bottleneck is conforming an obviously much larger nose to a smaller ( heavily stylized) button nose, resulting in it wrinkling uncontrollably. I am wondering if anyone has any experience manipulating/finetuning this process to “smooth out” the result, rather than “pulling” the vertices of the original nose to the new positions that do not match its proportions. I have tried various advanced settings like patch smoothing, etc without any luck.
Any pointers would be highly appreciated! Also, knowing it cannot be done is acceptable feedback as well . I would love it if it were that simple; it would really improve my workflow!
I feel your pain on this one, conforming to extremely stylized characters where the ratio of nose width to the face is different than in a typical human (like going from a realistic nose to a small button nose) can be very challenging as Mesh To Metahuman is optimized to project and deform based on realistic facial topologies and landmarks
A ratio difference of that magnitude causes the wrap/conform to twist faces as it tries to cram the same number of triangles into a much smaller space while trying to maintain its edge flow.
A few things we could try or check to help smooth things out:
Adjusting Tracker Markers / Landmarks:
Have you tried manually adjusting the tracking markers around the nostrils and nose bridge? Sometimes, removing a couple dense landmark points in the nose area or slightly relaxing them outwards (rather than forcing them onto the stylized tip) can help the deformation interpolate between
Pre-deforming / Pre-shaping the Mesh (Blendshapes or Wrap Deformer):
A common workflow, especially with extreme stylized meshes, is running a quick pass in Maya, Blender, or Zbrush prior to running the Mesh to MetaHuman identity process. If you create a quick morph target or wrap-deform your stylized mesh closer to the proportions of the base MetaHuman head (softening extreme volume differences), it will make the tool’s job of fitting into the neutral pose much easier without severe topology pinching.
Check Out Mesh to MetaHuman Custom Mesh Workflows:
Here are a couple of useful resources that touch on handling non-standard head shapes and custom mesh conforming:
Out of curiosity, which version of the MetaHuman plugin are you running, and are you doing the conform pass in UE directly or using an external DCC tool for the wrapping stage? If you could share a close-up wireframe of the nose area of your target mesh, we might be able to get a better idea of what’s happening with the edge flow!
Hope this gets you started on some great experimentation! Let me know how it goes.
. I would love it if it were that simple; it would really improve my workflow!