Applying Pre-Made Clothing Assets

There is a wealth of 3D character clothing assets online. These assets can be applied in one of two ways, each with its own problems:

1. Outfits can replace the Body mesh of a Metahuman. However:

   1. The outfits must be suitable to replace the entire Metahuman body. This means the clothes must cover all the skin (including hands and feet), or contain its own skin mesh for portions not covered by clothes.
   2. With a custom body, the head and body will likely not transition/blend seamlessly, especially when animating. This could potentially be corrected with proper blend masks applied, but that opens a whole other can of worms and creates opportunities for further problems.
   3. The outfit needs to be rigged for animation.

2. Clothing assets can be placed on top of the Metahuman so they are "worn" like actual clothes. However:

   1. The clothing assets need to move with the Body. It is extremely difficult to prevent the body from clipping through the clothes.

Many of the above issues can in theory be corrected by editing the clothing meshes in a 3D modeling program like Blender or Maya. However, that requires a relatively advanced modeling skillset. Moreover, the more editing you do, the more likely it is that cloth physics will not work properly, if the assets had any to begin with. In such cases, cloth physics will need to be recreated, which is an entirely other subject to learn.

Attaching the Metahuman Head to a Pre-Clothed Body

To avoid many of the above problems with applying non-Metahuman clothing to a Metahuman Body, I tried attaching the Metahuman Head to a pre-clothed, non-Metahuman body. However, this ultimately leads to the same problems as replacing the Body Mesh with a non-Metahuman outfit described above.

Creating Clothes from Scratch

To have full control over the clothing, I tried creating my own clothing assets. There are several programs that simplify the process of building clothes. Two of the most popular are uDraper and Marvelous Designer. While both are promising programs, it is still very challenging to make clothing at the same level of realism as a Metahuman. Additionally, a uDraper or Marvelous Designer workflow almost always requires some work in a 3D modeling program as well. Again, this is a valid option, but it is a skillset I need to expand before relying on and can be additional time and expense.   

Using Pre-Made Metahuman-Ready Clothing

This is the simplest solution and the one with which I have had the most success. However, this forces me to be reliant on what assets others have created, and there are not many people creating Metahuman clothing yet. Hopefully this number continues to grow, as currently, the options do not offer much more flexibility than the standard Methahuman Creator assets. Moreover, quality assets can be expensive.

Modifying Standard Metahuman Clothing

Another possible solution that I recently came across is that of modifying the stock Metahuman clothing rather than replacing it. I have not yet explored this route, but plan to take this course to learn how to do so: Create Next Gen AAA Characters for Unreal Engine by Realtime GraphX on Artstation.