Metashart update (Patreon)

Brace yourselves for some yapping :) Well, at least now you'll know I'm not just lazy, and what I've been doing instead of animating. I'm sorry!

I've made huge progress with my MetaHuman conversion system. Basically, all the steps are in place, and I can convert any Gen 8 or Gen 9 character to a MetaHuman fully automatically: wrap, texture transfer, hair, outfit, rig, everything. I also have now a custom skin shader for both MetaHuman and Daz characters, with lots of control and customization options. Its have a lot room for improvement but it really good so far.

I've learned so much! I now consider myself a master of wrapping :) I know pretty much everything about Wrap3D at this point, and I also vibecoded my own, blender native, wrapper. While it's not quite as good as Wrap3D, it helped me understand best practices and learn to use Wrap3D much better. It also allowed me to work on Mac, since Wrap3D isn't available there.My proudest achievement is automatic point placement. To properly wrap one character into the shape of another, you need to manually place pairs of points on both meshes, which the algorithm then uses to match their shapes. I now have a system that automatically places points on any character, regardless of their shape. I use more than 200 points for each one, so placing them manually every time I wanted to wrap something was a HUGE pain. Not anymore.

While working with Wrap, I did a lot of tests on transferring textures automatically. While it's totally doable manually, creating a system that does it in one click turned out to be an almost impossible challenge.

Texture transfer graph in Wrap3D:

After numerous attempts i decided to transfer textures in blender. Now everything happens in one click :)

The MetaHuman face is absolutely phenomenal. It gives the character so much life, it's crazy! And I haven't even fully incorporated the wrinkle system yet. The depth and realism of the expressions are stunning.

I also took some time to learn Blender's hair system, and with a heavily modified version of Vaerhon's Hair Tool, I got really good results converting regular hair cards to Blender hair. You may noticed i did some experiments with Kassandra but now the tool and my workflow are much better

The next step is to practice modifying and improving them, since an automatic solution always lacks the necessary depth and detail.

Of course, there are A LOT of challenges and issues. While the MetaHuman face is amazing, the body is pure shit :) It lacks a lot of detail, and the default UVs give only one tile to the whole body, which is not nearly enough for the quality I'm going for. So early on, I decided to unwrap the MetaHuman body similarly to Daz, with the body, arms, and legs each getting their own tile. It really helps.

There's also a big question of whether to keep my model compatible with Unreal or not. Of course, it opens up a lot of possibilities for more interactive stuff in the future :) But it really complicates things like custom genitals, feet, or hands. For now, I support Unreal as well, and I vibecoded an Unreal bridge tool to send my MetaHumans to Unreal in one click. Crazy stuff :)

Anyway, these past few months have been crazy, and I'm proud of how much I've learned :) And I'm really sorry this took my focus away from animation. I promise I'll come back to it with double the effort very soon!I'll keep you updated and let me know if you want to know more :) I've learned so much and what to share it with everyone :)