All language subtitles for CustomMetahuman_8.2.mp4

Alright...
Let's fix the skinning of our clothes now.

I will show you how to adjust
the vertex weights,

to mitigate those issues we have seen
at the end of the previous video.

First, I want to remove the helmet.

We will import it as a static mesh
so it doesn't have to be rigged at all, actually.

Let's separate it and hide it for now.

I will also separate the cape
from the clothes.

The cape will need a slightly different
treatment as the rest of the clothes.

And it's only getting in the way.

So let's hide it as well.

The first step in adjusting
our weights is smoothing

In weight paint mode,

go to "Weights" and choose
the "Smooth" function.

In the dialog, you can now change
the Subset to "All groups",

and increase the Factor and Iterations values.

The values that work best

totally depend on the topology density
of your clothes.

For very dense meshes, you will have to set higher values
to get a better smoothing result.

Now let's hide the head as well, since
it's not moving with the body skeleton anyway.

The second step is now to identify
problematic areas and try to fix them.

Usually problems appear at areas
where the weight transfer doesn't work well,

because the clothes
do not fit the body form well.

This is typically the armpits
or crotch area.

Select the body rig,

go to Pose mode and move the arms
into a rather extreme position.

I then mainly use the "Average" brush
and set the strength to a lower value,

so I have more control in painting.

Now we can go through the vertex
groups and check

which group is responsible
for pulling these vertices.

For example, the clavicle could have more weight here,

and the upperarm_twistCor bone
should probably have less influence.

It's a bit of a trial and error

approach to figure out which bone
weight gives the desired result.

Finally, averaging weights on the Spine04 bone fixes
the issue in the left armpit.

Unfortunately, you can't use symmetry
in weight painting in Blender,

so we have to repeat the process
for the right arm as well.

Now let's check the pants.

If I rotate the legs into a split pose,
we get a quite ugly stretching of the mesh

in the crotch area.

It's probably rather unlikely
that your character

will have such extreme poses
or animations in a game,

so sometimes it's not really necessary
to address issues

which will never arise anyway.

But let's try and fix this.

The problem with the crotch area
is that the left leg should have

close to zero influence on the mesh
of the right leg and vice versa.

So if we start averaging vertex weights,
we might even make things worse.

What works quite well here
is the smoothing function though.

I separate the pants from the rest of the outfit,

since I only want to smooth the pants,
then select smooth and set iterations

to a very high value
like 40 or even higher

Now the stretching
is not as extreme anymore,

and this could work for 99.9%
of all use cases of the character.

For the cape, I want it to only move
with the spine and shoulder.

since some of the arm bones seem
to have transferred weights to the cape,

we can go through the vertex groups,
find the ones we don't need at all,

then jump into edit mode and assign
a value of zero to the whole cape.

After that, it's just using the Average brush again,

to fix the parts where we just deleted all weights from.

I want to apply
cloth physics to the cape later,

so usually the top part of the cape,
that is touching the body,

will be fully driven by the skin,

and the lower part will move

independently with the cloth
simulation in Unreal Engine.

So I don't really care about the bottom
part being stuck to the legs or anything.

A final thought for the whole skinning process:

Don't stress too much about getting it perfect.

Obviously, if you have severe clipping issues

or very weird deformations,
this is something that should be fixed.

But there will always be, let's say,
not so clean deformations and stretching.

You see that kind of
things in any triple-A game.

Even if you look at the original metahuman clothes,

The skinning is not perfect.

Okay.

The last items for my outfit are the helmet

and the fur on the shoulder pad.

I will unparent the helmet from the rig,

delete all vertex groups
and then set its origin to geometry,

and move it to the world center so that
its rotation is around its center of mass,

when we import it to Unreal Engine.
Then I duplicate the shoulder pad.

This will be our Fur.
Separate the copy from the clothes mesh and uncheck

"Show emitter" in the particle settings.

All right, guys, we are all done and ready
to bring it all into Unreal Engine.

In the next chapter, I will walk you
through the setup in Unreal.

We will create materials and material instances, import
and bind the shoulder pad groom asset,

and then also look at
cloth and physics simulation.