MetaHuman Collection assets are available in Unreal Engine 5.8 as an Experimental feature and are still in active development.
MetaHuman Crowds let you populate scenes with large numbers of MetaHuman characters. You provide the source MetaHuman characters, hairstyles, and clothing. The crowd system handles the rest: it builds optimized versions of those assets, spawns characters into the level, manages level of detail (LOD) as the camera moves, and animates them.
How Crowd Characters Differ from Standard MetaHumans
The Crowd Collection Pipeline applies several optimizations to make rendering large numbers of MetaHumans practical. These are mostly transparent to you during setup, but there are a few differences in appearance and fidelity to be aware of.
Hair Uses Card Meshes Instead of Strands
The pipeline converts strand-based grooms into skeletal meshes with card textures. This is significantly less resource-intensive to render than strand grooms, but crowd characters do not have strand-level hair detail or hair physics simulation.
Meshes Use Reduced LODs
The pipeline strips higher-detail LODs from generated meshes, keeping only the levels needed for the distances at which crowd characters are typically seen. You can adjust which LOD indices are retained in the Collection’s build settings if your crowd appears at closer range than usual.
Distant Characters Have Reduced Animation Fidelity
Characters further from the camera render using the Instanced Skinned Mesh Component. This representation does not run the post-process Anim Blueprint and therefore does not apply animation correctives. Animation quality is reduced compared to close-range actors, but the difference is less noticeable at a distance.
Next Steps
The following pages describe the installation and steps to be taken when creating a MetaHuman Crowds.
Getting Started in MetaHuman Crowds
Learn to set up the MetaHuman Crowd plugin and prepare the source assets needed to build your first crowd, including MetaHuman characters, grooms, clothing, and the crowd pipeline components.
Create MetaHuman Crowds
Learn to build a MetaHuman crowd end to end by creating a crowd Collection, generating Instances, configuring a Mass Entity, and placing a Mass Spawner in your level.
