Unreal MetaHuman face meshes not exporting correctly

Attempting to export a MetaHuman from UE4.26.1 (100.5.126 connector) to Omniverse works great for all geometry except the face mesh, which ends up being an invalid mesh. Same results with either character in the publicly available sample project (BP_metahuman_001 and BP_metahuman_004).

(Not sure if this is the best place to report issues like this. If not, please let me know where is.)

This is a great place to report this issue. We haven’t yet dug into the MetaHuman stuff yet and will be looking at it soon. Thanks for reporting!

Glad to hear that. Related, being able to export facial animation is high on our list too. Figured having a valid mesh to animate would be a good place to start. :)

Cheers

I took a quick look and found a few things (among many other possible issues):

  • Most of the materials fail to export as MDL due to the View Space to World Space TransformVector material expression node and others that don’t translate to MDL

  • The provided levels do not export very well for some reason, the meshes don’t lay out correctly and things are invisible in Create. We will look into this.

  • Even if you export the level, the individual skeletal meshes are exported under the Props folder. I exported with USD Preview Surface enabled and I can open it in Create.

  • I made a very simple level with a face mesh plus the only anim in the project (a mapping animation), and this exports to USD and is visible in Create:

  • Here it is in Create with that mapping animation running:
    FaceMeshWithAnim

  • Note that we can export the Groom components if you enable the OmniverseGroom plugin. We don’t enable it by default. Create doesn’t currently render USD Basis Curves yet though.

  • The MetaHumanSample map animation is driven by facial animation components that we’re not yet exporting to USD.

Since there are no stored animation files I decided to try to record the playback of the entire BP_metahuman Blueprint using the Sequence Recorder. This generates a proper Level Sequence with sub-sequences which will export properly to USD. After a bit of tweaking (remove original BP, make the level sequence actor “possessable” rather than spawned, delete the visibility tracks), I was able to export a stage with the skel mesh and animations.

There are bugs, no doubt (where’s the shirt animation!?), but it exported… we’ll refine this and handle some of these issues.

MetaHumanRecordedPlayback

Interesting, thanks for the quick updates. I’ve tried exporting just the face mesh, and get a similar result as when I was exporting the whole character. When loading it into Omiverse (Create or View), the mesh is just missing. When viewing it in usdview, I get this:

image

I’ve tried the export on two different machines–same result.

I also reproduced this with the released version, I will figure out if there’s a difference between my dev branch or with my export method. Thanks for sending the USDView shot, that helps with context.

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Our latest hotfix 100.6 addresses these issues, please try it out!

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