Assembly | MetaHuman Documentation | Epic Developer Community

Assembly is the process of building your character into assets that are ready to be used in a project. MetaHuman characters come with many features that make them ideal for linear content and high-fidelity real-time experiences. They can also be optimized for better performance in games and more limited real-time experiences.

Multiple assembly pipelines are available, each creating assets that are optimized for these different target environments.

To be assembled, a character must be rigged and the high-resolution textures downloaded.

Assembly is the precursor step to packaging a character assembly for selling MetaHumans on Fab using the MetaHuman Manager.

To assemble a character, navigate to the Assembly tool in the ribbon menu.

Assembly Pipelines

There are four assembly options available.


UE Cine	Create Unreal Engine assets at full, cinematic quality with the highest fidelity. MetaHumans assembled using this option can be used for both offline cinematic rendering and real-time rendering where quality takes priority over performance. Once assembled, refer to the MetaHumans in Unreal Engine documentation for more information about working with these assets.
UE Optimized	Unreal Engine assets that offer comparable levels of fidelity to UE Cine, but with a focus on the higher performance necessary for most real time applications. This assembly pipeline offers three levels of optimization — High, Medium, and Low. Once assembled, refer to the MetaHumans in Unreal Engine documentation for more information about working with these assets.
UEFN Export	Export UEFN-ready assets, migrated directly into the target UEFN project. This assembly pipeline offers three levels of optimization — High, Medium, and Low. UEFN must be closed when using this option. Once assembled, refer to the MetaHuman in UEFN documentation for more information about working with these assets.
DCC Export	Export head DNA, face DNA, and texture files as a zip archive ready to use in a third-party DCC application such as Maya or Houdini. This option is required when using MetaHuman for Maya or MetaHuman for Houdini.

After selecting the assembly pipeline and relevant options, click Assemble to start the process. Once assembly is complete, make sure to save any new assets that have been created in the project.

Experimental options to customize the assembly process can be activated by enabling the Enable Experimental Workflows option in the Project Settings.

Cinematic and Optimized Characters

The UE Cine and UE Optimized assembly pipelines allow you to make choices that balance fidelity and performance for your project. The visual difference between Cinematic quality and High quality is somewhat noticeable, but the most prominent difference is the file size.

The following table details the differences between a cinematic and optimized character after assembly.

Item	Cinematic	Optimized (High, Medium, Low)
Materials and Textures	Full resolution textures. Separate materials to cover all use cases and offers maximum flexibility.	Compressed textures to save on memory. Optimized material with less instructions and baked textures.
Levels of Detail	Focus on quality over performance at the lowest LODs.	Adjusted LODs are more aggressive to improve performance in most use cases.
Animation	Highest fidelity animation blending. Body and neck correctives enabled.	Optimized animations and settings that enable and disable correctives based on the LOD.
Hair	Full use of strand-based hair on LOD 0,	Optimized hair groom settings to improve performance on most use cases.
Memory Footprint	Average size is between 1 – 2 GB.	Average size is under 100 MB.

You can further optimize your MetaHuman by adjusting the settings in the MetaHuman Component and the LODSync Component.

UEFN Export

The following table gives an example of the use case for different levels of optimization, particularly as it applies to UEFN Export.


High	Use for close-up shots, where the camera would be showing the details of a character’s face, wrinkles, and hair. MetaHumans at this quality level have the highest fidelity Level of Detail (LOD) available to them that have all correctives, physics, and facial animation enabled. On current gen consoles this quality level also uses strand-based hair. For UEFN Export, these MetaHumans will add more to your project’s upload and download size than for the lower levels.
Medium	Use Medium Quality for a scenario where 3 or 4 characters would appear at a reasonable distance from the camera.
Low	Use Low Quality for crowd shots, where the camera is far away from the MetaHumans, or where the characters serve to set a background scene. At this level you only get hair cards, no correctives, and no physics (RBAN).

High

Use for close-up shots, where the camera would be showing the details of a character’s face, wrinkles, and hair. MetaHumans at this quality level have the highest fidelity Level of Detail (LOD) available to them that have all correctives, physics, and facial animation enabled.

On current gen consoles this quality level also uses strand-based hair. For UEFN Export, these MetaHumans will add more to your project’s upload and download size than for the lower levels.

Medium

Use Medium Quality for a scenario where 3 or 4 characters would appear at a reasonable distance from the camera.

Low

Use Low Quality for crowd shots, where the camera is far away from the MetaHumans, or where the characters serve to set a background scene. At this level you only get hair cards, no correctives, and no physics (RBAN).

You can further optimize your MetaHuman by adjusting the settings in the MetaHuman Component and the LODSync Component.

DCC Export

When using the DCC Export assembly pipeline, you can export either a folder or zip archive.

If you intend to use your character with MetaHuman for Maya and MetaHuman for Houdini you must either export a folder, or extract the contents of the zip archive to a folder after export.