Everything MetaHuman Animator does interactively is also available to scripts. Scripting matters when a shoot produces more takes than you can process manually. Examples include a day of stereo head-mounted camera (HMC) capture, a session of Live Link Face recordings from several performers, or reprocessing an entire archive after a plugin update. The pages in this section show you how to build an automation pipeline that you can repeat, queue, and review.
Prerequisites
The MetaHuman Animator plugin, enabled in your project.
The Capture Manager Editor plugin, for the in-editor download and ingest APIs.
The Python Editor Script Plugin, for any Python covered here.
The Editor Scripting Utilities plugin, which provides the Blutility support behind Editor Utility Blueprints and Editor Utility Widgets.
Two more plugins apply only to specific pages:
The Markerless Motion Capture plugin applies only to body tracking from mono video, described in Process MetaHuman Performances with Blueprints.
The Calibration Diagnostics plugin applies only to the Diagnostics Based Selector, described in Select a Camera Calibration for Your Footage
Choose Your Approach
The Blueprint and Python APIs expose the same underlying functionality. Choosing between them is a question of where the tool runs and who runs it, not what it can do.
Use Blueprint when a person supervises the run. Use Editor Utility Blueprints and Editor Utility Widgets to give an artist a queue, a progress bar, and a Cancel button. The event-graph model suits the asynchronous nature of ingest and performance processing. You start the work, and a completion event fires later.
Use Python when the run is unattended. Python suits headless and batch invocation from a farm, a build step, or a scheduler. In those contexts, a blocking call runs to completion and returns an exit code.
Typical host | Editor Utility Blueprint or Editor Utility Widget | Script run through UnrealEditor.exe |
Best for | Artist-facing tools, in-editor review, per-take retries | Batch and headless runs, farm and CI integration |
Execution model | Asynchronous; completion and progress events in the event graph | Blocking calls are acceptable and require less code |
Queue handling | Built into the asynchronous nodes; shown in the UI | You write the loop |
Feature coverage | Full | Full |
You can combine the two workflows. For example, you can create a Python entry point for the nightly batch, and an Editor Utility Widget that calls the same operations for artists who handle exceptions the next morning.
What You Can Automate
The pipeline runs in this order:
Download takes from a capture device
Ingest takes into Footage Capture Data assets
Generate Camera Calibration assets from calibration takes
Choose which calibration to apply to a given piece of footage
Process a MetaHuman Performance into animation
Export an Animation Sequence or Level Sequence
Not every project needs every stage. Audio-driven and mono video workflows skip calibration entirely; stereo HMC workflows depend on it.
Relationship to Capture Manager in Live Link Hub
Capture Manager also ships inside Live Link Hub, and that path has its own Python API. Those scripts run through LiveLinkHub.exe -ExecutePythonScript. For details, see Python Scripting in the Unreal Engine documentation, including the shipped live_link_face_download_only.py and take_archive_ingest.py examples.
If you already run Live Link Hub as the front end for capture, automate download and ingest there. The in-editor equivalents are then optional.
The pages in this section cover the same work in the Editor, without Live Link Hub — you can run it from an Editor Utility Blueprint, or from Python that you run through UnrealEditor.exe. Use this path when ingest must happen in the same process and project as calibration, performance processing, and export. One script or tool can then carry a take from an archive folder to an Animation Sequence.
The two paths produce the same footage capture data assets.
Scripting and Automation Guides
Download and Ingest Takes with Blueprints and Python
Batch Processing
Process and Export Animation with Blueprints
Use Editor Utility Blueprints to process MetaHuman performances from mono footage, depth footage, or audio, and export the results as animation sequences.
Batch Process Camera Calibrations
Generate camera calibration assets from multiple stereo capture takes in a single automated pass, using Blueprint or Python.
