When trying to fit a groom to a different skeletal mesh, typically you would create a new groom binding asset and set a source and target skeletal meshes.
I’m trying to do this on 5.4.3 (also tried in 5.4.2) and as soon as I set a target and source skeletal mesh I get a message “building groom binding data” wich completes fine in a few seconds and right after that a new message “waiting for skinned assets to be ready” and Unreal freezes, with task manager showing no cpu usage.
I first encountered this problem when trying to fit metahuman grooms, but it is also happening with any skeletal meshes and groom, no matter how simple or complex they are.
It is working fine in 5.2 but can’t make it work on 5.4 even on a fresh engine install.
Ok, I still don’t fully understand what’s going on, but I have a working solution.
Before modifying the binding asset, set “Editor.AsyncSkinnedAssetCompilation 2” (it defaults to 1) and then set the proper source and taget meshes in the binding asset. Set Editor.AsyncSkinnedAssetCompilation back to 1 right after modifying the binding asset.
I also encountered another problem that even if your source and target meshes seem to be set properly, the groom isn’t fitting properly to the target mesh. I don’t really understand this issue either but it seems like the groom asset itself gets “corrupted”, even when setting new binding asset with proper source/target meshes. So the best solution is to delete the groom asset and reimport it, or if it is a metahuman groom, get the same groom from a diferent metahuman, or delete and reimport the metahuman from quixel bridge. Simply duplicating the groom asset inside unreal to get a “new” asset wasn’t working for me.
Thank you very much. Fortunately my groom did not corrupt, but I thank you very much. out of curiosity how did you figure out what needed to be done?
I really hope everything will work correctly in ue 5.5 because it seems epic always releases unpolished versions of the engine
When setting the binding asset, it felt like it was building correctly, but then doing some unnecesary “check”, the “waiting for skinned assets to be ready”, so I guessed that there must be some command to disable that check. Then I found out that if you type “help” into the console you get a pretty cool page with some descriptions to all the console variables and commands you can set throught the console. So I started looking for “groom”, “binding”, “skinned”, etc and found out about that command.
As for the “corrupting” thing, yeah, it probably won’t happen in most cases. I guess it happened to asset I was using while figuring this stuff out, so it somehow got corrupted in the process. I mentioned it because after finding about that command, I was able to retarget other grooms without issue, but not the one that I actually wanted to retarget, the one I was using during testing. So if you ever are in a situation like this that you feel the groom and binding are set properly, and you can’t figure out why the groom isn’t fitting nicely, first try to reimport the groom before spending too much time trying other things.
I created a new project with ue 5.4.3 and created a binding and i noticed that now before the editor freezes, it displays the message: waiting for skinned assets to be ready (target mesh) and waiting for skinned assets to be ready (source mesh), which when i had tried with previous versions it didn’t happen (i think) and just then displays another message and freezes. Anyway thank you very much, i will continue my project even though i completely forgot how it worked lol
I had this problem myself, then I just found out a solution. It seems that the binding freezes whenever the origin of the skeletal mesh (the actual rig origin) and the groom asset) doesn’t lineup. I am working in blender, but just fixing the origin of each asset worked for me. This might help someone else with the same issue.
