All language subtitles for CustomMetahuman_3.1.mp4

So guys, let's get to the texturing part,
which is probably most exciting,

and will introduce a very distinctive
look to our Hero.

The workflow for texturing
our metahuman character,

that I'm about to show you,
involves Blender and Substance Painter.

But you can of course use
any other texturing software you prefer.

As a first step,

let's export the assets
that we will need for texturing.

What we need for that is obviously
the body and head meshes.

And since we don't want to start
texturing from scratch,

but rather build upon the already
existing textures,

we will also export the base color
and normal map textures for head and body.

So let's do this first.

Find your body mesh
and export it as an FBX

Make sure to deselect every option
in the export dialog.

Especially, we don't want to export
all the other LODs.

For those, who do not know
what LODs are,

LOD means Level Of Detail.
In game engines,

it's all about performance,
so every mesh typically has a number

of lower resolution representations of the mesh,

which are activated
at increasing distance to the camera.

If you export the LODs you will get
all those meshes in blender.

The head is even more complex
and comes with eight LODs,

so sometimes people get confused
when they see something like this.

You can either delete
all the meshes of LOD1 and higher,

or just make sure
to untick the level of detail checkbox on export.

or just make sure
to untick the level of detail checkbox on export.

Right. Back to exporting...

Export the body mesh and the head mesh,

and then open the corresponding
material instances.

If you are having trouble
finding the material instances,

just click on your character folder
and type "synthesized" in the search bar.

Those are the two instances for the body
and head: The BodySynthesized

and the HeadSynthesized_Baked materials.

Find the base color
and normal map of the body

and export them.

Same thing for the face.

Find the main base color map
and normal map and export them as well.

I will show you how we deal
with the additional base color

and wrinkle maps
at the end of chapter three.

Now that this is done,
we can open up Blender.

The second step of the workflow
is to really give our character some love

and sculpt some nice details as well as
prepare the materials and textures,

so everything is neatly set up
for a stress-free texturing experience.

Let's import the FBX files in blender
and hide the skeletons

By the way, you can change
the look of your mesh in the viewport

in the materials tab, at the bottom
under Viewport Display.

As usual, I like to keep things organized,

so I move everything into a new collection
and call it Lowpoly.

This is going to be our low poly mesh - if you want -
that we use in Substance Painter.

Duplicate the collection
and call it Highpoly.

Remember how I told you in Chapter 2
that we are not allowed

to do anything to the mesh
except moving vertices?

The good news is: At this point

we can do whatever we want to the mesh.

Since we will not import
the character itself back to Unreal Engine

but are only interested in the textures,
we can sculpt all the details

that we like and bake these details
onto the normal map later.

That means you can increase the resolution
of your mesh to millions of polygons.

You can use Dyntopo or Remesher.
Anything goes at this point.

Before we sculpt,

let's join the body
and head of the high poly model,

and then merge the border vertices.

To select them,

you can go to -> select -> select all by trait -> non manifold.

We don't want to merge
the eyelashes and mouth,

so we go into X-ray mode and deselect those

Then just press M and Merge by Distance.

Check if everything is actually merged
by selecting the non manifold vertices again.

Cool.

Now we can do a sculpting pass on
our character and introduce some details.

I will fast forward this part
so I don't bore you

with making you
watch a long sculpting session.

The only important thing here is:
The low poly and high poly mesh

should more or less overlap
for a clean baking result.

So don't go too crazy here,

Ii's only about details at this point.

I'm now quite happy

with my high poly sculpt,
and we are almost done in Blender.

We have already looked at the UVs
in the previous chapter,

but let's quickly refresh
and also do some clean up on the materials.

I don't intend to change the texture
for the teeth, tongue and eyes.

I don't intend to change the texture
for the teeth, tongue and eyes.

The only thing I'm interested in
is the head itself.

If you go into edit mode
and then to the material list of the head,

you can select the part of the head
that has the material

HeadSynthesized_Baked assigned to it.

Then press P two separate this part.

Back in object mode,

we can now hide all the rest

Then, since all those other material slots
are not needed anymore,

you can click on the arrow
and remove the unused slots.

Now we have only one material for the head.

As a reminder,

the UVs for the head and body
are located on different UV tiles.

This is great,

since we can actually use a UDIM workflow
for texturing across different UV tiles.

If you don't already know, UDIM
stands for Universal Dimension,

and is a way of splitting up the UVs
of an object into multiple textures.

This is used to achieve
very high texture resolutions

without the cost of loading
huge 8K or 16K files.

The UDIM tiles have a numbering convention,

starting with 1001, 1002 etc.

for the first row,
and 1011, 1012, etc.

on the second row.

Great.

Now we have almost everything
we need to begin texturing.

To use the UDIM workflow in Substance Painter,

we need one single material for the whole
body and appropriate texture file names.

So let's join the head and body
of our low poly model with Control-J,

and delete the head material.

Now we can export our low
poly mesh and the high poly mesh.

Then let's rename the textures.

The UDIM textures
need to have the same name

except for the UDIM tile number at the end.

So we have the head UVs located on the 1001 tile

and the body on the 1002 tile.

Let's rename the base
color and normal map accordingly.

Now open up Substance Painter.

Create a new project,

select your mesh,
set the document resolution and activate

the UDIM workflow.

Then let us bring our textures in.

Select only the 1001 files
and drop them in.

Substance Painter will then automatically search
for UDIMs with consecutive numbers

and import them as well.

You see here the number 2 displayed
over the textures, which shows that

the texture set uses two UDIM tiles.
One for the head and one for the body.

Let's
check the UV layout, which looks good,

and let's make sure
we have only one material with our

two UV tiles
by clicking on the texture set list.

Everything looks good.

To get a base texture layer,
create a new fill layer,

deselect every other channel
except for the base color and normal

and drop the textures into the slots here.

Finally,

we need to bake our hand
sculpted details onto the normal map.

Substance Painter will also generate
a couple of other textures

that will be used
in the texturing process,

like the curvature
and the ambient occlusion maps.

Since we would like to stay consistent
with the way

the metahuman textures are set up,
we will bake in 8K.

And Boom, we are done!

Everything is set up and it's time
to give our character our custom look

Again,

feel free to pause the course here
and explore on your own.

The next chapter is optional,
but I will show you how

I textured my Hero in chapter 3.2,

before going into how to use our custom
textures in Unreal Engine.