MetaPipe Test

This was a test to see how far can I push customizing a Metahuman’s face.

In my earlier tests I would use the Unreal plug-in “Mesh Morpher” to create blend shapes to alter the appearance of the Metahuman face.

This issue that can come from this is that blend shapes don’t alter the bone structure of the skeleton. The facial skeleton drives 90% of the animation of the face on the Metahuman rig, so you can get wild artifacts where the eyes actually pop out of the Metahuman’s skull.

I used the Metapipe suite of tools. What’s nice about these tools is that they use Maya, which is what Epic uses for their backend to create the Metahuman. It also will automatically move the face joints to the correct location (I believe Mesh Morpher can do this as well now)

Overall I was really happy with how this turned out. The body is a bit of a mess though. I might need to touch up the eyes a bit and parts of the ear are too thin. You can also see the seam where the face connects to the body, but I’ve since figured out how to handle that.