Before I type out what I decided to do with my midterm, I wanted to go a little bit through working with Metahumans. It isn't super easy and I have not totally figured it out, but here are some tips so far.
Last night I decided to pivot my project to something completely different, but I first started to use metahumans in my original file.
The first thing you have to do is just connect your account to metahuman creator and access the web app. From here, you select a base model and start working in the sims-like character creator.
Generally, I would say this step is best explored on its own, but here are a few callouts.
Blend: The blend window will allow you to add multiple existing characters and lerp the details of certain features to look more like one of the blend characters. This is useful for offspring, family members, and adding variance to your characters. Additionally, if you're looking for features from a specific race, it is often faster to blend than sculpt and craft on your own.
LODs: Levels of Detail. This is a feature in unreal engine that changes the complexity of actors and their textures so that when they are far away, it is not so computationally taxing to render them out. Generally, metahumans only look good on LOD 0-3 or so. However, if you're in need of something less computationally intensive, they go up to LOD 7. That said, there are features (usually hair) that are NOT available past LOD2, so just keep that in mind.
Clothes: There are only 3 tops, 5 bottoms, and 4 shoes. It isn't a simple process to change a metahuman's clothes, so if that is important, avoid metahuman until you have time.
Making Children: There is no "make child" button in metahuman. Make sure you choose a short body type, make the skin texture appear quite young, remove accents that make a player look older. Use tips and tricks to make character look younger (lifted nose, less sharp jaw, etc).
The process for getting a Metahuman into unreal is really simple. As long as you have Quixel Bridge installed and its connected to the same account you signed into metahuman with, then you can just navigate to Metahumans → My Metahumans and download the file. When you do this, make sure to download in at least 2k. You likely won't need 8k, but 1k was too low-res for what I was looking for.
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In order to understand how a Metahuman works, you will need to go into your character's blueprint. You can find this in your content browser under Metahuman → Character Name.
A metahuman comes fully rigged, but you cannot just apply any animation to it. You will need to retarget it in something like Autodesk's Motionbuilder. But how do we access the rig? Well, a metahuman is made up of a ton of different assets and blueprints and etc. In this case, we want to access animations applied to the body. So, we go into the components tab, click on body, and in the details panel, locate Skeletal Mesh. In the case of these characters, the skeletal mesh is called m_srt_nrw_body.
Select the magnifying glass to pull it up in the content browser. Right click → asset actions → export. Now you have the rig. Do not be alarmed by the fact that it is just the hands and feel of your character, this is normal.
Just to point out some things though, you can explore this mesh file as well. You'll see it is apart of another hierarchy of animations that go skeleton → mesh → animation → blueprint. I'm not 100% sure how much you need to understand it, but it can help with troubleshooting later down the line. In fact, when adding the animation, you wont see m_srt_nrw_body ****as a mesh to attach to. You'll use methuman_base_skel, wich you can see from that hierarchy I spoke about.