Behind the Seams - Mini breakdown
Building Rina Tavik with MetaHumans and Cloth Simulation
You can find a link to the Rina Tavik metahuman blueprint file (.MHB) at the bottom of the page.
Grab the project for yourself here
My goal was to test the capabilities of MetaHumans and have a bit of fun with cloth simulations in Marvelous Designer. The mission was to craft a character that felt at home in a galaxy far, far away.
To mature my character pipeline, I use Marvelous Designer, 3ds Max, Unreal Engine, Substance Painter, and Marmoset Toolbag, each instrumental in bringing my creations to life.
I began with Midjourney, providing post-apocalyptic Star Wars prompts, followed by a sci-fi-themed mood board. This visual guide steered the aesthetics of my character, Rina Tavik.
I always start by building out the garment roughly using the Avatar Lines tool. This helps me peel the fabric right off the surface of the body, giving me a good base to quickly refine into the basic shapes of the garment.
From there, I focus on translating the concept to 3D, emphasizing silhouettes and distilling the core of the concept into 3D. In this case, it was about keeping the waist slim to contrast the masculine baggy pants and bulky jacket.
For the accessories, I turned to SlideKnit, a great little script created by slidelondon. It flattens the mesh based on the UVs as a guide. I build the accessories flat, which makes the whole process much easier. Then, I skin them to the flattened guide which is then morphed back into its original position, taking the new geometry with it.
This is where I have fun playing with the MetaHuman creator. It's like The Sims on steroids. For this concept, I was going for a very natural look to keep the focus on the cloth, which is no sweat to achieve with MetaHumans. I also chose to depart from the concept and gave her some red/orange hair to complement her green/beige outfit.
The total polycount is just under 21K, with 1 UV tile for the cloth and another for all the accessories and scarf. I used Marmoset to bake each of the maps, which is super streamlined and easy.
Surfacing is my favorite part of the entire process. I make sure to alternate between Unreal and Painter to get a better idea of how the surfaces will look in the engine. I spend most of my time getting the overall grunge feeling dialed in. Then work on the complementary textures and patterns for the fabrics, contrasting matte surfaces with glossy ones.
The MetaHuman rig proved to be very easy to work with. Retargeting mocap to the MetaHuman rig works well and has plenty of documentation online. I retargeted the MetaHuman rig to the UE5 mannequin and pasted in animations from Mixamo. There is also a library of facial animations that you can paste in very easily too, which previously would have been so time-consuming to animate from scratch.
All in all, I’ve really enjoyed working with the MetaHumans assets. Going forward, I want to try Live Link for facial animation and customizing the MetaHuman face and body with 3D scans.
MetaHuman Blueprint File
To perfectly match the soldier character, download the MetaHuman blueprint file below. This config file allows you to import the exact settings for the MetaHuman character to match the outfit:
Download the
.mhbfile.Open MetaHuman Creator in your browser.
Import the file.
Download the MetaHuman into your Unreal Engine scene.
