All language subtitles for CustomMetahuman_Part2_Intro.mp4

Hello and welcome to Part 2 of this course!
In the previous chapters,

we have created a custom
metahuman character with modified shapes,

textures and hair.
But we are far from finished yet.

So let's make some clothes!

When you look for tutorials on metahuman
custom clothes,

you will often find a quite popular
approach to this topic, where you replace

the body with a completely different mesh
with its own skeleton,

be it a Mixamo skeleton
or any other type of rig.

This is really great, especially
if you have a full body armor mesh.

You can then just import your armor,

stick the metahuman head on it,

delete the chest part of the head
using an opacity mask,

and you are good to go.

However, if you have a clothes design
where parts of the body

are still visible,
this approach becomes difficult.

So in this course
we will go a different route.

We will create clothes
that are rigged to the metahuman skeleton

and perfectly tailored to the body type
that you chose for your character.

Implementing
the clothes in Unreal is as simple

as just assigning the mesh
in the metahuman blueprint.

It's a noninvasive approach
where we do not change

anything of the character setup.

The focus of the next chapters

will be to show you the clothes creation
pipeline from start to finish.

This is, by the way,
not specific to the metahuman characters.

The tools and techniques
that you will learn here

apply to any type of character and style.

We will first create a high poly version of the clothes.

The process of actually creating the cloth items

is absolutely independent
of the choice of software.

I will show you the tools

that I use in my work,
which are Marvelous Designer and Blender,

but you are free to work
with any sculpting or

modeling software you prefer.

We will then create a clean, low poly
or rather mid poly clothes model

suitable for animation in Unreal Engine.

I will show you different approaches
to retopology

and how to achieve the best results
as efficiently as possible.

In Chapter 7, we will look into UV
unwrapping and texturing,

and then I will show you the process
of rigging and skinning of the clothes,

and how to set up metahuman clothes
materials, textures, and cloth simulation.

Now this is the complete pipeline
for clothes creation for a

game-ready character.

But there is freedom to deviate from it
if you wish to do so.

Within this process, there are different approaches

you can take to achieve the result
that you need.

You can, for example, skip
some of the steps such as retopology

or even rigging,

if you decide to use alembic animation
data for your clothes,

which I will cover in Chapter 10.

That totally depends on your use case
in Unreal Engine.

For example:

Do you use the metahuman character
for movie production or for a game?

Will you have a lot of close up shots
of the character's face and upper body?

Are your character animations

rather moderate or will it do crazy
backflips and extreme dance moves?

Do you need realistic cloth simulation,
or is a skinned mesh sufficient?

Is performance an issue?

That means, will you have
to optimize the polygon count

because you have many characters
in the scene?

Are your character animations fixed

or do you need flexibility
in Unreal Engine?

Every use case will have implications

on how to approach
the creation of your clothes items.

There is no right or wrong way.

It's just a matter of preference
and expectation.

Whichever application you have in mind,

I will show you the different steps
and variations of the process,

so you can decide for yourself
which approach is most suitable to you.

All right. Let's get started.