Create Next Gen AAA Characters for Unreal Engine

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Use Metahuman technology and transform the base character into your unique character

This course is a one-stop shop for the whole pipeline to create high quality characters for Unreal Engine.

Use the Metahuman technology as a base, and then transform the base character into your individual creation, using Blender, Substance Painter and Marvelous Designer (see complete list of software at the bottom of the page).

The course consists of two parts. In Part 1 (Chapters 1-4), you will learn how to modify the character's face and body, create custom textures and hair groom assets. In Part 2 (Chapters 5-10) we go through the full professional pipeline of creating clothes and props for your character.

Course content:

PART 1

Chapter 1: Create a MetaHuman Base Character

1.1 Create a Metahuman Base Character
Learn how to create your base character in the MetaHuman Creator, and what you need to consider for customization.

1.2 Metahuman Export to Unreal Engine
How to export/import a MetaHuman character in UE4 and UE5.

1.3 Inspecting the MetaHuman
A full analysis of the construction and functionalities of the MetaHumans in Unreal Engine, including Skeletons, Blueprints and Materials. We will discuss the issues that will arise during our customization process, and what to pay attention to.

Chapter 2: Custom Head and Body Mesh

2.1 Model Preparation for Mesh Sculpting
Introduction to the Mesh Morpher plugin, model analysis and Blender project setup for sculpting and editing of the MetaHuman head and body meshes.

2.2 Sculpting the Mesh
Time-lapse of my sculpting process

2.3 Creating a Morph Target in Unreal Engine
Learn how to create a morph target for your MetaHuman, and how to bake the sculpted modifications to a new mesh, without compromising any of the functionalities of the model (control rigs, blend shapes).

Chapter 3: Custom Textures

3.1 Model Preparation for Texturing
Everything you need to know about the materials and UV setup of the MetaHumans, including the UDIM workflow for texturing, model preparation and cleanup and setting up of textures. This chapter also includes the workflow of sculpting high resolution details and baking them into the normal maps.

3.2 Texturing Process
Time-lapse of my texturing process in Substance Painter.

3.3 Textures and Materials Setup in Unreal Engine
Learn how to import your new textures into Unreal Engine, and how to apply them to your character. We will discuss how the additional color maps and wrinkle maps of the head are set up, and how to create your custom wrinkle and color maps.

Additional content 1: How to set up Roughness, Metallic and Emission textures
Learn how to implement roughness, metallic and emission textures in the master material, using masks and packed texture maps from Substance Painter.

Chapter 4: Custom Hair
4.1 Creating Custom Hair
Introduction to hair particle systems and Blender, and a walkthrough of my hair creation process for top hair, short hair, breakup hair and flyaway hair layers.

4.2 Groom Setup in Unreal Engine
Learn how to create your custom groom assets in Unreal Engine, generate LODs for the hair, and adjust the look of the hair strands and materials. We will also take a look at how the LOD system for the MetaHuman head is set up and how to solve potential issues of disappearing textures and groom assets.

PART 2

Chapter 5: Creating Clothes in Marvelous Designer and Blender

5.1 Model preparation for clothes creation
Prepare the character avatar for clothes creation and rigging.

5.2 Creating clothes in Marvelous Designer
Learn how to create clothes in MD. We will look at different techniques to create garment patterns, how to introduce details like topstitches, and discuss the different export options.

5.3 Modeling and sculpting clothes in Blender
Create basic clothes shapes in Blender, and refine the outfit by adding accessories such as belts, buttons, pads and a helmet. We also discuss some important issues to keep in mind, when making decisions on what type of cloth items you want to add to your character.

5.4 What next? Retopology, Thickness, Details, File Organization
A few points that are generally helpful to know, to make your outfit creation experience easier.

Chapter 6: Retopology

6.1 What is retopology and why is it necessary?
Brief introduction to retopology, and the pros and cons of retopologizing the clothes mesh.

6.2 Retopology workflow in Marvelous Designer
Learn two approaches to retopology in Marvelous: the automatic remesher and manual retopology.

6.3 Retopology workflow in Blender
Learn how to create a low-poly mesh, using only Blender's native functions.

Chapter 7: UV Unwrapping and Texturing

7.1 UV unwrapping and mesh preparation for texturing
Preparing the mesh for texturing. This includes creating a clean UV layout in Blender, assigning materials and separating meshes.

7.2 Baking maps and texturing process in Substance Painter
Time-lapse of my texturing process in Substance Painter.

7.3 Export and combining textures per UV tile. Material setup in Blender, model inspection
Learn how to optimize textures and materials by combining textures into clean UDIM texture sets.

Chapter 8: Rigging and Skinning
8.1 Clothes rigging to the metahuman skeleton
Learn how to parent your clothes outfit to the metahuman skeleton and how to transfer vertex weights from the body to the clothes.

8.1 Clothes skinning
How to use weight smoothing and weight paint brushes to fix issues with the clothes vertex weights.

Chapter 9: Clothes setup in Unreal Engine
9.1 Importing clothes assets in Unreal Engine, material setup
Import clothes items as skeletal meshes, expand the number of components in the MH blueprint for additional clothes items, import and attach static meshes, import and attach groom components. Solve clipping issues for the body.

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Software used in the course:

Unreal Engine 4 / Unreal Engine 5 (Free)
Quixel Bridge (Free)
Blender (Free)
Substance Painter
Marvelous Designer
Texture Set Combiner (Free)

Plugins / Addons:
Mesh Morpher
HairNet (Free Blender addon)

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