Metahuman Custom Body in Unreal Engine (works in UE5)

how's it going everybody welcome back to the channel and we have our first video of the year we're actually going to talk about customizing some characters we're going to use one of the free assets for january it's one of the free assets for the months you wanna make sure you download that and we're going to be adding a metahuman custom body so make sure you stick all the way to the end so you can see how that works but before that let me give a shout out to my patrons right here and thank you to everybody that's supporting the channel remember you can join the patreon or you can just leave a comment leave a like for the youtube algorithm that also goes a long way now i do have an instagram now if you want to follow me there there's also twitter and follow me on discord so you can get all your questions answered now let's get started with the video okay here we are in the main map of the rog accessories this is one of the things that we're going to be using today as of the recording of this video this asset is completely free it was on free for the month for january if you're watching this much later and this is the one that i'm talking about so if you're still watching this in january make sure that you get this one because it includes a lot of things and they're all very high quality from the looks of it that you can use to customize your own characters they also have some other cool assets and by the way at plant games if you're watching this video and you want to you know help me look at your other assets just contact me it's in the about section anyways once you've downloaded this you just go into the map and you should get this that being said if you want to do the customization thing like they do on their demo video make sure that you may that you use a gameplay template because if you use the film template this is going to happen are you not going to be able to move your character i don't know how to move the character here because this is not a game template however this does work the intent of this video is not to use this in this way we're actually going to put things together and create our own character so i'm going to stop that just want to mention that that in case you want to have these assets uh that way you need to make a game template and not a film template like i always do now you can see there's a bunch of things from here that we can use we have some cloaks we have some ropes i'm actually not going to use the ropes i'm going to use something else that is in one of the folders that they provide but we also have some cool shoulder pads that we're also going to use and we're going to take a look at some of the gloves and select some for our custom character now the reason why i'm making this video is because putting these together for animation use it's not in your usual ways the way that i would put a meta human a custom metahuman together is by creating a blueprint and that's it it just works out of the box because the body is already a skeletal mesh and it's just one scheduled mesh there is a paid plug-in that's called skeletal mesh merger that you could use for this but i'm not going to use that i'm actually going to do it one of the ways that they tell you about in the documentation so i encourage you to read documentation for this it's usually in here if you just click on written more you should find documentation if you want to go there but the way that you do this is that you actually create a blueprint where you make one of these the master and all the other parts actually follow with the animation i know it sounds weird but i'm going to walk you through it okay so i just got a new map just a regular map nothing to it and what we're going to do is we're going to start constructing our character i like to construct the character first like select all my pieces and then we'll put the blueprint together so we can go into the content once you add this to your project you should have an rog modular armor and once you go in there you can go into armor cloth we're gonna use the mannequin version the reason why we're gonna use mannequin version is because the managing is the most compatible with all the animations that i have so we're just going to go from there and we have some folders here we have some chest boots helms and pants i'm going to choose these because i don't want to create kind of like a mage character i want to create more of a warrior character and these will serve for that so you have your chest here that actually has some sleeves in there too and we're gonna do is we're gonna zero out the location by clicking this little arrow here that says reset to default there you go now it is in the center of the stage i'm gonna move that to the sides there you go okay so we're gonna do the same thing with the boots and just have while you can do this with any of the assets that are in there okay let's do pan so he the boots are not floating in there just see where i'm at and okay as you can see they're all together in the same place actually let me flip the light so we get some light on our character much much better okay so we pretty much have a partial character right here we're just missing some stuff i want to add some shoulder pads we're missing the hands of course and the head and for that we're just going to go back into rog modular armor and we can go into the accessory ropes now we're still going to be using the mannequin version and let's look at the shoulders so for the shoulders we're going to again be using schedule meshes and we have a bunch of here so let's just try some and see which one looked better so we have this one which is a single shoulder pad we have these which i find really cool let's see we have these two and we have this which actually go across the chest all right so let's see uh oh let's let's do this one because this one's fun this has a cow's head actually a cow skull but whatever okay so let's try them on so all you have to do is click on them zero them out and there you go that's how they look they actually fit all the pieces fit together there may be a little bit of artifacts here and there but they all fit together quite nicely and i dare say it's a very uh aaa asset if you want to use it for a game it works very good for film too and let's see this one actually fits really well i'll probably keep this one just put it aside let's try the one with the chest guard and as you can see it actually looks good it goes over this it's actually clipping a little bit from here but um yeah you can kind of fake that when you're doing the animations just don't focus on these areas it actually does look pretty cool but not my favorites we're gonna put it aside let's do the single one click here and this one looks like it doesn't add anything to it so i'm just gonna take it out let's try the one with the kyle skull and it actually looks cool for like an evil character or for like a necromancer or a druid or something this will work very well but anyways let's take with the one that i like which was this one okay now let's look at the gloves again it's got a little meshes there are some gloves here that i do like uh these are very like which are three-esque if you play that game um we we can look at other gloves like this one these are your regular leather gloves and you can see you get pretty close and see that the textures are very very high quality and we have these with a little bit of you know metal over there not a fan of those i think i'm gonna stick with these because they actually go with this part and i'm going to teach you something about the coloring and all that later okay we got the gloves and all we're missing is a head we're going to talk about the hat later because we're going to stick a meta human head on this character so i'm going to get rid of these and right now this is a character that is pretty much in pieces so if you were to animate this if you were to throw it in sequencer you would have to create an animation per these the good part about these modular armor pieces is that they're all skeletal meshes that means that if you if i were to throw these and put an animation they will all move the same but now that i have the ones that i like what i'm gonna do is i'm actually going to create my character so all you have to do is right click group blueprint class and we're going to create an actor not a character we're going to create an actor i'm going to call in character 1 double click these and we're going to start adding pieces to it so the first thing that i want to add is the chest so we're going to browse to that asset if you want to browse the acid just right click it's right here i'm gonna throw this in here and as you can see it shows up in your blueprint okay let me position the camera this way there you go okay got the chest let's look for the boots and let's do the gloves are they under here uh can i drag and drop them from the viewport no not really all right i'm going to look for the pants now and if you keep chest selected then you don't have to do the parenting thing it will just auto parented it so for the shoulders there you go and you can rename these to whatever you want i'm just gonna keep their stock name for a little bit and you can compile and you have a pretty much unified character in a way that means that you can throw this into the environment so if i save or to go here and if i throw this here pretty much see that i can manipulate this as one piece however if i were to throw this in sequencer i would have to animate each part separately so we're gonna do is we're going to make this animatable so we don't have to animate each and every single piece now the way that i got this information was from the unreal documentation and there you go this is what you need to do i'm actually going to leave a link in the description down below i'm going to do it with you as well um so this is the only thing that we need to do for to get this working so we need to look for the set master pose component and then we just need to parent all of the others i'm going to the same thing as they did here and make the torso the base of the controller so if we go into our blueprint you're gonna see that we do have a construction script and set master post component and as you can see we have all the parts from our blueprint so i'm going to choose the chest and there you go i'm actually going to make this the master so i'm going to make it here and break all the pins here and what we're going to do is we're going to start drag and dropping you can put this one in this slot that's why blueprints are so cool to work with for us artists and we're going to drag all of these here we can just parent them all to the same i'm not gonna click on this one i'm just gonna leave it as it is compile as you can see this means that everything is working fine so save that and what we're going to do is now we're going to go into sequencer let me delete this and put up a new one just in case go to sequencer grab our character throw it in here we're going to only add the chest component and then in track we're going to look for animation and let's say we want to do this is one of the animations that i have in there so as you can see the whole body animates perfectly but no problem even though they are still separate pieces but because we did that small blueprint sequence they all fit together and it works quite fine okay now we have our character together let me show you something really nice that these assets have so if we were to actually go here and into the material let's look at the material for a second you can see that we have several things to play with i think it's very cool material so let's go into the rack effect and rack power so if i do this you can see how it starts turning into kind of like a you very old and dingy robe over here you can take that off really quickly but we also have diffuse color tint so that means that we can change the color of this piece now if i wanted to make it more on the reds or more on the blues or the greens or whatever uh you're just giving it a tint you are not coloring the different parts you're just giving it a tint for the most part and i think this color is pretty cool so you could do that and again this one updates as well because i'm using the material instance so let's go into the gloves let's see what the gloves have we can also they all have the same thing from the looks of it we can actually change the tint of the gloves because it's probably too bright so what i'm going to do is there you go so they match a little bit better they do match and it looks more leathery let's see what can we do about the boots same right here maybe make it a dark brown and with the pants um they actually look fine but let's see let's just change the tint to something else uh let's see i think yeah that one looks better our shoulder pads i'm gonna leave the shoulder pads as they are because i do like the way they look but as you can see we created a whole custom character with a very cool look by just adding a few things online again like i said these are very very high quality assets now when it comes to metahumans if you have not watched my other videos all you have to do is if you are in 4.27 or before unreal engine 5 you have to go to bridge if not then you have to go to the bridge plug-in if you're using unreal engine 5 early access but everything is in the same location so if we go here into metahumans as you can see i already have my metahumans right here but all you have to do is click on one of the metahumans it doesn't matter who and just click on start mhc and it will take you to the metahuman creator if you want to customize your own metahuman now i do have some metahumans here and this is actually the one uh yeah i call it this uh the one that we're going to be using for this tutorial one of the things i recommend is keep it in the highest resolution i know it's a lot but it's just going to look a lot better you have to download it and export it out so i've already downloaded i'm just going to click on export now as you can see i have my metahuman folder and there is something very particular about this meta human because if i were to throw him in here you know see there he is missing something he is of course missing clothes but i just took them out because we're going to be using this now as you can see he doesn't have the lower the upper part of his chest and what i did is one of the techniques to get his head to be without the shoulder so i can put his head on here now there are various ways that you can do meta humans with custom clothings there are actually tons of videos that i watch the ones that have been the best for me and the reason why i picked these two is because they have different uses the first technique comes from monoville he actually has a very good tutorial on how to do a metahuman with a custom body and this is where i got him so i'm going to leave a link in the description below to his channel so you can watch his video and download the opacity mask that they made because that's the technique he used he uses an opacity mask to mask the bottom and that way you don't have the shoulders because when you put the meta human head on a custom body sometimes you have the problem of having the shoulders around unless you create the body yourself and you customize around that now for that all you have to do is actually go into the this folder so the shared folder i have this is the address where you have to look for it and double click on the material this is a base material so if you have more than one metahuman in your scene all of them are going to change and just make this masked and just add the opacity mask and you should be fine now if you want more details on that please go to his video and watch because he has a very good tutorial on how to do this so this is technique number one so technique number two i'm not using this tutorial but i wanted to point it out in case you're interested in using this the rococo channel has a very cool way to just get the head of the metahuman and controls very well it works as they say because i tried it myself and it's really good the reason why i'm not using it in this tutorial is because this particular tutorial allows you to have just the head mostly so it will serve for a character like this one where you don't need the neck i do need the neck so this one doesn't work for this tutorial but i highly encourage you to watch this video because it's a very cool way to just get the head of a meta human now once we have the metahuman all we have to do is pretty much add him to the blueprint so he's going to look so there you go we have a metahuman i'll probably pull him back a little bit like that there you go so we have a cool character uh just by using these things and of course i'm going to show you how to add him to the blueprint now let's go into that double click your blueprint and all you have to do is let me browse to [Music] his head this floating head all you have to do is make a duplicate always make a duplicate of stuff in case you mess up so once you do the opacity thing it's going to look like this and all you have to do is delete the other body part so let me actually duplicate this one more time so i can show you there you go we're just going to eliminate torso legs feed body and all that remains is his floating head which is pretty much what we need so once we have that sorry let me get back to here we go into our blueprint we're gonna look for our head and we're gonna throw the head in here also make sure you do the lod sync to zero so if i double click the head you're gonna see that there is this lod sync if i click on it you're gonna see that the force lod is zero this is defaulted to minus one the reason why you wanna make this zero is so you can see all the hair and all the good stuff uh even if you're zoomed out because it's very jarring every time you zoom out a little bit it actually changes to the other leds and it looks horrible so make sure you do that before doing this so it looks correct then all you have to do is get the head throw it in here compile and we pretty much are good to go except this head is not positioned where i wanted it to be so you can just make it a little bit higher so as you can see it showed up over here as well because it's updating in real time now this heads a little bit small for this body so i'm just going to do 1.07 and there you go okay so once we position it this way it's not going to work and the reason why it's not going to work is because he is not parented to anything in the bone chain even if he's parented this way if he's not parented to the bone chain once you do the animation this is not going to work so what we need to do is while on your head uh i mean the character hood not actually your head you have to go into sockets and you have to make sure that you type head some people like to do it to the neck um i have not gotten good results when it's to the neck so there you go and now the head is going to do this it's going to turn on it's 90 degrees so you have to do make sure you have angle snap on so turn it 90 degrees and bring it back down again to a position where you think it looks best actually i like to go here and look at it from this angle i see that i can move him a little bit further back there you go probably around here and you can take it out this way okay there you go so now we have a functioning character with a meta human hand all you have to do is compile and save and we're going to go and we're going to grab our acin we're going to throw it into sequencer now the cool part of this is that it actually kept control right for the face so if i wanted to animate his face somehow i could do it i have all the controls around here if you want to do that i'm not going to do that right now i'm actually going to show you how to animate him first so we take re get rid of that go to character track and we're going to add a track for the chest like we did before now once you go into the animations it's just going to show you the animations that you can use for the rog if you wanted to use it with other animations it's actually pretty easy you don't have to retarget anything all you have to do is go to the content browser go here into let's say uh where is it there you go right click on the asset and you're gonna see that there's something called skeleton assigned skeleton when you create your character with these acids it's going to use the skeleton from that comes with the acid pack and we want to assign another skeleton maybe from a pack that you downloaded which actually i'm going to use here so let's assign skeleton you can see i have a bunch of skeletons here because i have some asset packs that i purchased and we're going to be using let's see let's use the short one because i have a this is a paid pack you can use whatever asset pack you have but i'm just going to use this one i'm going to click accept and after that if we go into sequencer go to animations i have all the animations available for the sword pack without actually having to retarget anything and the reason we're not retargeting anything is because we grabbed the pieces that were related to the mannequin so everything is one to one pretty much i'm just gonna grab let's say this one and there you go so this is kind of like the one that i have over here and he is making that attack pretty cool attack i'm gonna play the animation boom let's make it longer so we can loop okay so as you can see boom he does that with the sword and you just have to stick a sword in his hand now there's a little bit of an artifact here where i would probably move his head a little bit to the side so it doesn't show up like that but you know those are some little fixes that once you add the animations uh you can just change those if you wanted to but as you can see we pretty much have a custom metahuman with a custom pack that's being added to these other free assets so thank you very much for watching i remember to leave a like leave a comment leave me your questions down below if you had any problems any trouble with this i want to know down in the comment section so i can help you out and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: MR3D-Dev

Views: 37,220

Keywords: metahuman custom clothes, metahuman custom body, unreal engine metahuman tutorial, unreal engine skeletal mesh tutorial, skeletal mesh merge ue4, atlant games, Modular Medieval Accessories and Robes, unreal engine, epic games, game engine, unreal engine 4.27.2

Id: y42Qej7Bx8g

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2022