When you assemble a MetaHuman, the Bake Materials option is enabled by default. To skip the texture and material baking process, disable this option. The assembly then outputs the full material, which exposes all material parameters for direct editing.
Unbaked assembly is useful when you need much greater control over the MetaHuman materials but still want a fully rigged MetaHuman asset to use in a project. To bring changes made to the unbaked MetaHuman back into MetaHuman Creator (or to use entirely different materials on a MetaHuman) use the Material Overrides feature.
The unbaked material is designed for the MetaHuman Creator UI and has significant runtime GPU cost. It is not recommended for direct use in projects with tight performance budgets.
If you simply want to export the materials to have access to the unbaked materials and texture and don’t want to run the entire assembly process, another option is to use the Export tab and use the Materials Export tool where the exported materials can be automatically added as overrides.
Example Use Cases
The following are common use cases for unbaked assembly:
Replacing makeup masks: MetaHuman Creator provides several built-in makeup masks. With unbaked assembly, you can swap them out directly with custom-made masks.
Custom makeup mask Adjusting specular and roughness responses: The default specular and roughness values in the MetaHuman head material only support global adjustments through the UI. With unbaked assembly, you can adjust finer details such as nose tip roughness and control cavity strength.
Adjusting Specular Response through UI material Keyframing material parameters for linear content: For pre-rendered content, having access to all material parameters may outweigh the additional GPU cost of the unbaked material. For example, you can change parameters such as cheek redness per shot, which would otherwise be baked to the final base color texture during assembly.
Keyframing value in a sequencer Replacing animated maps: You can toggle delta maps on and off depending if you prefer to use full base color + normal maps or the more optimized delta map representation.
Animated Maps tweaking, highlight the “Use Delta Maps” parameter
