Hi all,
I am trying to get the new panel cloth system to work with Metahumans.
However, I am facing two fundamental problems, that prevent me from using cloth simulation for my Metahumans.
First, let’s outline the problem:
Metahuman Setup
Metahumans use two separate skeletal meshes, one for the head and neck, the other one for the body.
There is no way to combine these two skeletal meshes, as far as I know.
I have tried many different solutions using Maya and Unreal Engine, to no avail.
This leads to the fact that you have two meshes with skin weights and physics assets.
Skin Weights
Skin weights are important, as we need to transfer them to the cloth asset.
Currently, I use the skeletal mesh of the body to transfer skin weights.
However, that mesh is missing the weights for the neck and shoulder area, as they are part of the head.
If we take a look at upper-body clothing, we can see that the neck and shoulder area is the area that most clothing sits on. Therefore, being able to transfer weights for that area would be great.
The solution to this: The combined mesh from Maya
If you have access to Maya, you can export your Metahuman from Quixel Bridge to Maya.
The exported Metahuman again consists of 2 separate skeletal meshes.
However, there is a third, combined mesh.
It follows the general body type naming convention, mine is called: f_tal_unw_combined_lod0_mesh
If we compare the skin weights for spine_04 and the clavicle bones, we can see that the combined mesh is better suited for cloth simulation:
Standard Metahuman Body Mesh
Combined Metahuman Body Mesh
So in general for typical metahuman body meshes, we can use the combined mesh from Maya to use for the Transfer Skin Weight Node in the Panel Cloth Editor.
As far as I know, that is only possible for people using Maya.
My suggestion: Adjust the import workflow so that the combined mesh gets imported into Unreal Engine by default.
Now if we look at custom metahuman models, the only way to solve this problem is to export your separate, customized meshes into maya and transfer the skin weights from the combined mesh to your custom meshes.
Physics Assets
Physics assets can be generated for skeletal meshes. Within the panel cloth workflow, they are used for collisions.
We face the same problem as with the skin-weights.
We have two separate skeletal meshes.
Each can have a great physics asset with really good mesh-coverage using convex hull or level sets.
However, a combined physics asset cannot be created.
Altough I can add some basic shapes to the body physics asset that mimic neck and shoulders, it lacks precision and often leads to gaps between the body and clothes.
In this case, the combined mesh from Maya does not help in any way.
We are stuck with an “okay” solution by adjusting the body physics asset to make up for the missing neck and shoulder colliders.
Kinematic Collider
Nevertheless, Panel Cloth for UE 5.4 introduced an alternative collision solution.
It uses a static mesh and transfers the skin weights of the skeletal mesh onto it.
Note: We face the same problem as with the transfer skin weight mentioned above
It could be a viable solution for metahumans, but I could not get it to work properly.
The problem is that the only mesh that can be used for this workflow is the complete-mesh we get in Maya.
However, that mesh is different from the actual mesh that is used in the scene later on.
I tried to research every little thing there is, but without a full tutorial on “how to do panel cloth for Metahumans the right way”, most of us will be lost.
If anyone has figured this out and can help me, I would be super grateful.
