Getting Started with Parametric Clothing

Before You Begin

It’s especially important to note whether your asset has a sim mesh or not. Unless you have created one, or if you’ve done a USD export from Clo or Marvelous Designer, you will be working with a render mesh only.

Depending on how complex your asset is, you might still prefer to create skeletal mesh clothing instead of parametric clothing.

Skeletal mesh clothing does not resize, but one important distinction from the previous version of MetaHuman is that now, because of parametric bodies, you can create that clothing for any body shape you want, as opposed to the base 18 archetypes. You can now distribute that body shape via preset, even as a part of the package you sell.

This also means that you do not have to skin your clothing. All you need is the model, and it will function exactly the same.

Parametric Outfit Asset

As this workflow only covers the process inside of UE, but does not cover asset creation in your DCC of choice, you’ll learn about the new parametric outfit asset.

The Outfit Asset is a new chaos cloth asset type, which is capable of containing parametric clothing. The outfit asset associates your clothing with the body it was made for (source body). It then warps the clothing based on the difference between the source body and a new body with different measurements (target body).

In some cases, the source body and target body are too different, which can cause warping. This is especially the case with more realistic and detailed (not stylized or simplified) clothing. Due to this, we encourage you to create multiple outfits for multiple source bodies, with the idea that the closer to an original source body a target body is, the less warping artifacts a user will get. 

You can choose to put in as little or as much additional effort as you feel is necessary for the clothing to meet your needs. You can also start with one, test it, and see if you need to add more. Our system automatically detects which source body is the best match for each new target body and selects the appropriate source clothing to resize from.

Essential Terminology

Parametric and Fixed

• These terms refer to whether the asset can change its shape. In the context of clothing, it refers to whether the garment will resize with the character, or is made for one specific body shape.

• The word Resizable is also often used interchangeably with parametric in the context of clothing.

Skeletal Meshes and Outfit Assets

• Skeletal Mesh Clothing (fixed, non resizable) is what clothing creators have been doing to make clothing up to this point. Creating a clothing model and skinning it to the body.

• Outfit Asset — a new asset type. Outfit assets are made to be able to handle complex combinations of separate pieces of clothing. They were also created with resizing capabilities in mind. If you’ve played around with chaos cloth, then you may be familiar with cloth assets — an outfit asset is like a cloth asset but with many additional capabilities, and must contain one or more cloth assets.

Simulation Meshes and Render Meshes

• Render Meshes — these are what you generally think of when you think of the model for your clothing asset.

• Simulation (sim) Meshes — a sim mesh is a simplified, single-sided mesh. It is used for cloth simulation, which drives the deformation of the more complex render mesh. It may also be a lower resolution than your render mesh.

Render Mesh	Sim Mesh
A render mesh: Is what gets rendered Can have thickness Can have detail Always exists	A sim mesh: Drives render mesh Does not get rendered Is used for simulation but also can be used for resizing and skinning functionality which is the context we will be discussing in this talk Is not required and does not have to exist in every asset

Presets

• Presets are how we share information about MetaHumans with each other. MetaHuman Creator (MHC) comes with some built-in presets but you can also create and share (or sell) your own.

  • Any MetaHuman Character can be used as a preset —  you just need to drag that character or folder into the presets window.

  • Presets can be used to copy all settings, such as facial features, skin tone, hair, etc.

  • They can also be used to transfer body shape only. This allows you to make your own MetaHuman and just transfer info about the body shape from a preset.

  • The head and body shape of a preset, without skin color, etc, can be transferred from any preset by right-clicking on the image of any preset inside the “All Assets” section of Head & Body > Blend.

    

Assets and Prefixes

Next Step

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  Parametric Asset Setup

  Preliminary steps for creating your Parametric Outfit Asset.