Hi everyone. First I’d like to thank the developers and the community for all the information. I learned a lot, yet I’m still very new to Unreal engine and game engines in general.
I’m setting up a workflow for my project, in order to take still renders of ‘a lot of’ MetaHumans (MH). By the end, I will potentially have close to 300 MHs. I have chosen MHs for this project due to their texture quality, and creation options. And you can’t beat the ‘free’ price tag. Below are the details to what I setup so far. I’m open to any suggestions of other workflows that I’m not aware.
Hardware & Software
i7-14700K
64GB
GeForce RTX 4070
SN8000S NVMe SSD (heaps of space)
Windows 11 Enterprise
Unreal Engine 5.5.4
Locodrome MAT plugin (MH plugin which I found immensely helpful, as I found the default methods unworkable for my purposes)
Project Info:
Create around 300 characters, and render still images of each character separately in 3 different scenes (1 image per scene, per character). Renders need to be as photo realistic as possible. Characters will be in different poses in each scene. Only one character needs to be visible in each render. Camera distance to characters will be between 1.5-3 metres.
Level setup:
I have set up a persistent level which contains the cameras, MHs, and meshes for the general building. Everything is static. I opted to have the MH and cameras possessable rather than spawnable.
Sub-levels:
Each scene where MHs appear are organised in separate levels, and loaded via the level sequencer. These scenes contain the relevant meshes and lighting for that scene. I believe this helps with managing resources while working.
Sequencer:
I created a level sequence for each scene. The sequence includes the references to the cameras, MHs and any props they have. I’m using ‘Level visibility’ track to handle the sublevel visibility.
Each MH is in their own track within the sequencer. They are posed and positioned within the scene.
‘Actor Hidden in game’ is added to each of them, and each MH appear for one frame. This way I can just send the whole sequence to the Movie Render Queue and render all characters at once.
Challenges and Questions
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First thing, is it crazy to have around 300 MetaHumans in one project? Will I suffer heavily in terms of editor performance (note that I will need to deal with one MH at a time per frame). If so, what is an alternative workflow?
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Whenever I’m in Animation mode, there is a huge lag after every save where the engine is unresponsive for around 10mins. Some parameter changes may also trigger this pause. I can’t pin point the cause of this. I’m working in ‘Unlit’ mode with ‘Low materials’ and Engine scalability set to ‘Low’. Is it simply due to having a lot of MetaHumans in the sequencer?
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I started the project in one computer, and I needed to move to a different computer. I simply copied the full folder directory to the new computer and working on the new one. Would this add any complications that I’m not aware of?