MetaHuman Assembly
Before running the Face Optimizer or the ARKit 52 exporter, your MetaHuman needs to be assembled first. The assembly settings you choose will determine the triangle count, LOD structure, and texture quality you'll have to work with down the line. Getting this right matters, especially before batch processing dozens of characters.
Every project has different needs: an RPG with cinematics and character dialogues has different requirements than a fast paced multiplayer shooter with 16 characters on screen. The settings below strike a good balance between visual quality and performance, but do your own tests on a single character and validate runtime performance and quality before committing to a batch.
Recommended Settings
MetaHuman face meshes come in different resolutions depending on pipeline and quality settings. Our recommended LOD for real-time game use is around 6870 triangles on the face mesh, striking an excellent balance between visual quality and performance. Conveniently, several different assembly configurations all land on this count, just at different LOD levels.
| Pipeline | Quality | LOD with ~6870 tris | Texture quality | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Optimized | Medium | LOD0 | ~1K | Good from a distance |
| Optimized | High | LOD1 | ~1K but better skin material | Recommended sweet spot for dialogues |
| Cinematic | Cinematic | LOD3 | 2~8K | Bit overkill for runtime |
Note that there is also a 17K triangle face available in Cinematic pipeline on LOD2, which has noticeably better looking smile (better mouth corner crease and cheek puffing) than the 6K but is very similar otherwise. Could be useful for closeups or cinematics, but a bit overkill for most use cases in our opinion.
Assembly Process
Note
The following step by step covers the manual assembly process within the native MetaHuman Character window in UE5.6+.
For our automated batch tool see Auto Assembler
Step 1 - Configure Assembly
Go to the Assembly tab in the MetaHuman character and set the following:
- Pipeline: Optimized
- Quality: High
- Set the target root directory to
/MetaHumans/Creator/ - Set the name to your character's name
Step 2 - Rig
Click Create Full Rig in the top bar. This will usually take several minutes during which the engine will be unresponsive, although you should see a progress bar appear after a while.
Please note that once rigged, you won't be able to make any changes to your character's face or body, only hairs are available. To edit your character you will first need to click Remove Rig in the top bar. Then when you want to assemble, you will have to create the rig again.
Step 3 - Download Textures
Before clicking Assemble, download the textures for your character, which should take about 20 seconds. You only need to do this once, no need to download again for future assemblies, unless you want to change the texture quality. In the textures section:
- Click Refresh next to the face textures
- Click Refresh next to the body textures
- Click Download Texture Sources in the top bar
Tip
Oftentimes after downloading textures, the entire assembly UI panel disappears, which is most likely a UE bug. Simply switch to any other tab (avoid "Hair" which takes time to load) and switch back to the Assembly tab, the UI should reappear
Step 4 - Assemble
Click Assemble. The editor will be unresponsive for several minutes. See the Auto Assembler page for more detail on what happens during processing.
Step 5 - Check your export
After assembly, go to /MetaHumans/Creator/<CharacterName>/Face/ where you will find SKM_<CharacterName>_FaceMesh. Open it and check the different LODs and their vertex and triangle counts.
In the right panel you will also find the material slots with different LODs for the skin material:
- LOD 0 is the highest quality but significantly heavier (only for cinematic exports)
- LOD 1 is the practical sweet spot for game use
- LOD 3 is noticeably degraded, maybe usable for big crowds
