Meta Humans are only supported in Unreal Engine version UE4.26 or higher.

Import MetaHuman Model

The MetaHuman Creator is a tool, with which you can design your own human character model called "MetaHuman". After finishing your model, you can download it by means of Quixel Bridge. Here you can select between different export targets, e.g., 3DSMax or Blender, but also Unity - or important for our case - Unreal Engine. The default download settings seem to work fine, so stick to those for now and hit download as option 1. Then grab a cup of coffee while waiting and import the model later on via 'import ' into the map of your UE project. Option 2 is opening your Unreal project directly and simply using the export function of Quixel to export the model directly to it.

After both options, a folder "MetaHumans" is created containing the data for all imported characters. A blueprint for spawning an individual MetaHuman can be found within the folder with the respective character's name.

Using MetaHumans with the Character Plugin

Using MetaHumans with our Character Plugin is a two-step approach. We recommend duplicating the blueprint of the MetaHuman you want to use with the Character Plugin beforehand (or work on the original blueprint if you want to).

1. First, open the blueprint of your choice and in the menubar select "File -> Reparent Blueprint" to reparent the blueprint to the "VirtualHuman" class of the character plugin.
2. Second, in the Details panel at the right, locate the property "Body Type" under the category "Virtual Human" and change it to "MetaHuman". Changing this property automatically transforms the model to fit into its Capsule Component and assigns the character plugin animation blueprints for the body and face of Meta Humans. Now your own MetaHuman is ready to be used as a Virtual Human from the Character Plugin!

Find some more information about using MetaHumans in VR in this wiki entry.

Face Animation

In the plugin content folder in "Characters/MetaHuman", you can find Pose Assets to be used in the face animation methods described in Face Animation.

Retargeting CC3 data onto MetaHumans

In case you want to use animation assets (like an animation sequence or blueprint), which refer to the skeleton of a Character Creator 3 model, with a MetaHuman, you need to retarget the assets onto the skeleton of the MetaHumans. All MetaHumans share one common skeleton, so once retargeted, animation assets should be applicable to all MetaHumans. Although the retargeting is already described in the Unreal docs, there are some tricks, which are not obvious, so the following text contains a short instruction on how to retarget onto MetaHumans from CC3 models.

Open the "metahuman_base_skel" asset located in the character plugin content in "Characters/MetaHuman". Furthermore, open the skeleton, to which the animation data you want to retarget points. For both skeletons, go to the skeleton tab and select "Show Retargeting Options" under "Options". Right-click on the root bone and select "Recursively Set Translation Retargeting Skeleton". Again for both skeletons navigate to the "Retarget Manager" tab (or open it by clicking the button at the top) and map the bone names under "Set up Rig" onto the Humanoid rig (described in the Unreal docs). When mapping the bone names for the MetaHuman, you just need to change the mappings "spine1 -> spine2", "spine2 -> spine3", "spine3 -> spine4" and under advanced, delete (press the X button) all the mappings, in which "ik" (short for Inverse Kinematics) appears. For the Retarget Base Pose select the pose "Retargeting/RetargetPoseMetaUE4Mannequin" in the plugin content for both skeletons. Save both skeletons.

Now everything is set up and you can go back to the Content Browser, right-click the animation asset you want to retarget and select "Retarget Anim Assets" and choose the MetaHuman skeleton from the Character Plugin content.