Where is the UE5.6 MetaHuman's skeleton?

Development Character & Animation
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1

This might be a stupid question but… after I designed and assembled my metahuman I am presented with no skeleton for my rigged character. How can I use this metahuman with an animation blueprint without a skeleton?

Am I supposed to assign a skeleton from a 5.5 MH or how/where do I get it’s skeleton from? Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for the assist.

EDIT:
I have been using Reallusion’s Character Creator up till now so I am incredibly new to MetaHumans so please forgive me if I asked something stupid :stuck_out_tongue:

2

When you have added Metahuman to your project a BP is created that has all the parts. Body face clothing etc. Open the BP and Select the Body under components. In the Details on the right you can look under mesh. This is the skeletal mesh asset that can be used to create an anim BP.

MetahumanBPSkelMesh
MetahumanBPSkelMesh1920×1257 117 KB

3

Hi @ksc. Thanks for the reply. I think I didn’t ask my question properly, sorry.

I am not looking for the Skeletal MESH but rather the actual SKELETON. Following up on your example, though, I looked in the blueprint, found the skeletal mesh, opened it (the clothing asset in my case) and looked at what skeleton it uses.

This led me to /Content/MetaHumans/Common/Female/Medium/NormalWeight/Body/metahuman_base_skel

I am used to having a skeleton asset matching the name of the character I imported appearing right next to the asset imported so when I saw this I thought I must be doing something wrong since 3 of the 4 characters I created are male but the skeleton for all of them are under common/FEMALE/Medium

I guess if this is not a poblem then that answers my question, use that female skeleton for all MetaHumans.

Now I just have to wrap my head around working with a model where the “Body” mesh is only hands, the first child being the actual mesh for the body and the second child being the head… trying to apply a single animation asset to the three. I see the metahuman_base_skel asset DOES have bones for the head and up to the hands so I assume I have to do some blueprint magic to apply an animation, am I right?

For facial animation (if needed) I need to capture that separately and play that back separately if needed. But facial animation is for Sequencer scenes only, right?

For actual stuff like locomotion I need to loop through all (three/two) meshes and play the same animation of all (three/two). Say I get an idle animation from Mixamo and retarget that to my MH character, if I don’t play the animation on the head mesh then I assume stuff like looking around will break completely so I have to play the idle on the head mesh and leave the facial animation stuff for Sequences. As long as the animation includes transformations for the neck and head and I play that on the head mesh everything will work as expected. Am I right?

TL;DR version:

  1. Use the /Content/MetaHumans/Common/Female/Medium/NormalWeight/Body/metahuman_base_skel skeleton for all MetaHumans
  2. Use blueprints to play the same animation on all meshes inside the blueprint in sync

Do I have it right? If so then I just need to wrap my head around how to sync animations between three meshes all the time. Do I just assign my animations to blendspaces and assign the same blend space to each mesh and have all three meshes get their driving values from the same variables in the blueprint they all share? That sounds about right… Is it? Or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely? :frowning:

Again, thanks for the assist. It is greatly appreciated

4

This happens because body mesh geometry that is hidden by the clothes are removed for performance reasons. But you should be able to animate the full MetaHuman in Sequencer by dragging the MetaHuman blueprint to it.

The Face follows the Body, so you can apply a single Animation Sequence to the Body and the Face should follow. If the animation sequence in question has both body and facial animation curves the values are going to be piped to the correct skeletal mesh.

I will recommend for you to watch the talk MetaHuman Animator in Real-Time where you can learn more about to play animation into MetaHumans

5

(post deleted by author)

6

I finally found a youTube video explaining how to turn the MetaHuman into a playable character. True it does require one to install the 3rd person template but looking at all the steps involved and the amount of time saved by doing so I am not complaining about this :stuck_out_tongue:

So for anyone else trying to use MetaHumans outside of making cutscenes, check out this video.

Enjoy!

EDIT:
One thing to note… While I was following along with this tutorial I ran into a very strange bug. In one place they said “click on the body and in the Mesh field make a note of which mesh your character is using” but in my case my mesh was set to “None”. In the viewport I could see all the various mesh pieces but in the details panel I had “None” set for every single mesh. Go figure.

When I started following this tutorial I started by duplicaating the BP I created in the MHC and then followed along with the tutorial using that copy. When I ran into that bug I checked the original BP to see which mesh it used and made a note of that instead. This worked perfectly for me.

Hope this proves useful to someone :slight_smile: