Stylized Metahumans in Unreal: Getting a Near-Exact Shape Match with Mesh-to-Metahuman

Mesh-to-Metahuman (M2MH) is Unreal's excellent tool for taking any face mesh and rigging it as a Metahuman face - this is really useful if you want to use facial mocap from MH Animator, or just use the FaceControl rig board inside the engine. My problem with M2MH's default output is that in order to safely fit the rig, a lot of the more stylized elements of a cartoony sculpt get rounded off (as you can see in the results at the end of Step 1).

As it turns out, the Metahuman Identity asset has a workaround for this - one that I have not seen documented extensively. I learned this by following the discussion and steps laid out by "JMelf" and "The_Distiller" on the Unreal Forums (here: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/new.... This is faster than setting up a custom morph, and requires no 3rd party paid scripts like MetaPipe.

The major insight is that by using the console command "mh.Identity.ExportMeshes 1" before you run the M2MH Identity Solve, you automatically get an extra conformed mesh that matches your target exactly, but also works for Metahuman components. You can then sculpt / wrap / edit this, and use it in a second round of M2MH (via the new 'Configure from Conformed' option) to get an exactly matched Metahuman head. Sometimes there is a need for some minor manual cleanup, which can be done via sculpting / smoothing.

Note that there is an optional step I follow where I check some of the eye movements with the paid plugin MeshMorpher from the excellent ‪@PugLifeStudio‬ - this is not required, its just useful. You can also use it to fix things like the eyelids using morphs and Bonesnapshots if that is your preference vs. sculpting.

Good luck, and would love to hear about results and approaches building on this workflow.

00:00 Intro
00:09 Step 1: Basic Mesh-to-Metahuman (remember to do "mh.Identity.ExportMeshes 1" first)
02:59 Step 2: Wrap conformed mesh around target mesh
04:21 Step 3: Second M2MH process using conformed mesh
06:54 Step 4: Manually cleanup any problem areas
09:20 Final Result

‪@UnrealEngine‬ #metahuman #stylizedcharacter #autorigging

Music: Bitchin' Fanfare by Martin Landstrom / Epidemic Sound
Original Stylized Target Mesh: Cartoon Dracula Head by Malicki (https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/ch...)