This page provides an overview of the main materials and textures that are provided after assembly to aid further customization.
The MetaHuman Character in MetaHuman Creator includes texture samplers and material functions required for customization, however these are expensive and unnecessary for the assembled character. The UE Cine, UE Optimized, and UEFN Export assembly pipelines will ‘bake down’ the materials and textures using a Texture Graph to create more real-time friendly versions which can be customized further.
Familiarity with Material Instances is beneficial.
Assembled Materials and Textures
Each assembly may bake the materials and textures differently based on their use case.
UE Cine | The highest quality — to use the MetaHuman as a hero asset, this assembly bakes normal and specular maps up to 8K and exports a version of the head material. |
UE Optimized | For cases where performance is of a higher priority than visual quality — the highest resolution texture will be 2K. Select between High, Medium or Low depending on your use-case. |
UEFN Export | Exports materials that are compatible with UEFN and its validation checks, similar to UE Optimized. |
After assembly, the baked material instance and texture assets can be found in the Face and Body sub-directory for each character. For example /Game/MetaHumans/MyMetaHuman/Face/Materials and /Game/MetaHumans/MyMetaHuman/Body/Materials, however the exact location will depend on your configuration.
Face Materials
This section describes the materials provided for the face.
Skin (MI_Face_Skin_Baked)
Material instances are created for each exported face LOD (for example, MI_Face_Skin_Baked_LOD0, MI_Face_Skin_Baked_LOD1, and so on) and assigned to the face material slots.
They use textures baked during the assembly process and provide parameters that enable you to make global adjustments to BaseColor, Specular, Roughness, Scatter and Normal values.
They use a common base texture set described in the table below:
Basecolor Baked | Any components of the face color (includes skin texture, skin accents, make-up, freckles, etc.) |
SRMF Baked | Specular, Roughness, Metallic and Fuzz in a single texture. |
Normal Baked | Base detail normal map baked to a single map. |
Normal LOD Baked | Used for distant LODs. A 256x256 normal map is used to approximate the normals of a higher resolution mesh, generated during the assembly process. |
Scatter Baked | The subsurface scattering amount baked to a 512x512 map. |
Pre-calculated animated delta maps are used to only store the difference between the base map and the associated animated map. By only storing the delta, we are able to use much lower resolution animated maps to save memory and performance. As a result, when tweaking the base color or normal maps, you should only need to tweak the base maps and not the animated delta maps.
Basecolor Animated Delta | 512x512 by default |
Normal Animated Delta | 1K by default |
Eyes (MI_EyeL_Baked and MI_EyeR_Baked)
The MI_EyeL_Baked and MI_EyeR_Baked material instances are assigned to the eye meshes and offer a large amount of customization to the sclera, cornea, iris, pupil for runtime use.
To allow this runtime customization, the baked texture set is slightly different to the face and body materials. Instead we provide basecolor and normal for both the sclera and iris.
Teeth (MI_Teeth_Baked)
Uses a similar baked texture set to the skin, however SRMF is replaced with SRM (Specular, Roughness and Metallic).
Body Materials
This section describes the materials provided for the body.
Skin (MI_Body_Baked)
The material instance assigned to the body mesh is MI_Body_Baked.
This uses the same parent as the face material and the same base texture set. However, several features such as animated maps are switched off.
Material Scalability Features
To help with performance, the face skin material instance assets have generic scalability settings that can be tweaked depending on specific project requirements.
Different material quality settings are also provided.
Face Skin Material Features
The face skin material instances created for each exported face LOD (for example, MI_Face_Skin_Baked_LOD0, MI_Face_Skin_Baked_LOD1, and so on) utilize different scalability settings to balance performance and fidelity at each LOD.
The following table summarizes the main differences between the scalability settings at each LOD:
LOD0 | Highest quality material instance. Best suited for cinematic scenarios. |
LOD1 | Micro Skin Detail normals are disabled. |
LOD2 | Use Animated Maps is disabled. AO is applied to the base color to help fake shadowing. |
LOD3 | A baked normal map is applied to approximate the LOD0 mesh normals. |
LOD4 | UseSimpleShading is enabled. This changes the material to a Default Lit material and applies material changes needed to retain a similar look. A baked normal map is applied to approximate the LOD0 mesh normals. |
LOD5 to LOD7 | Same as LOD4. |
Material Quality
In addition to the material instances for different LODs, we also toggle features on or off depending on the Material Quality setting in the engine, as part of the Engine Scalability Settings.
They are configured in the MF_skin_scalability node of the parent material graph.
Epic | Subsurface scattering is enabled. |
High | Subsurface scattering is enabled. |
Medium | Subsurface scattering is disabled. Animated maps disabled. |
Low | Subsurface scattering is disabled. Animated maps disabled. |
Next Up
The MetaHuman Component for Unreal Engine
Learn how to configure the MetaHuman component in Unreal Engine 5.