Hi all, I was expirimenting with the Metahuman for Houdini pipeline, involving getting my Metahuman working with the APEX system in Houdini (through use of the licensed HDA from the FAB marketplace) but I’m encountering issues as far as retargeting animations for the Metahuman, and I’ve been scouring the internet for some documentation and information on the process but haven’t found anything worthwhile.

I’d greatly appreciate either a specific solution regarding assitance with Metahumans and retargetting in Houdini, or more general Documentation involving the Houdini Metahuman system, any form of documentation for the updated H21 system and nodes would be great.

Thanks heaps!

Please try again with the latest (21.0.475+) daily build as a fix has been committed for using the APEX Control Extract SOP with the MetaHuman rig. If you're talking in particular for exporting MetaHuman animation from Unreal Engine to Houdini, then there's also a specific solution that we have but it's more involved.

oh I thought there was some official documentation then! but it led here. following on from this, it appears there is a metahuman .dna read now but no metahuman .dna write. currently or am I mistaken? I think thats a missing ingredient in the custom metahuman DCC turnaround

There is currently no DNA exporter from Houdini. From what I gather, this is something that Epic Games wants to add.

Indeed, .DNA out from houdini would complete the puzzle.
currently, as of latest daily 21 biuld, FBX character import and FBX archive import STILL alters the vertex count / UV seams / order (or something) which stops the roundtrip from metahuman 5.6 > houdini > Unreal 5.6 to edit something like face morph targets or conform template for custom metahuman)

ther is a few workarounds like try to use the File import FBX and be careful of vertex counts for metahuman but the new metahuman identity creator tool lets you export .obj of the base mesh! super handy so you can use this .objj as the in and out for the metahuman stuff and can conform / make morph targets etc with this as .obj respects the vertex count and order - unlike crappy FBX

so there is some workarounds currently for apex / meta human rigging, have you seen this guy (need translation on )

since there s literally no other info so far to do this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSeAe3sVhJE [www.youtube.com]

Note that I've posted another example here: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/102043/?page=1#post-450286 [www.sidefx.com]

TL;DR - Metahuman t o Apex Documentation is lacking but thank you greatly for this example file, Edward!

Hi there, I've been looking into using Metahumans for a project and the moment and find that I'm running into a lot of pitfalls and gotchas with the workflow as the documentation feels limited.

However, I'd like to say, that after stumbling across this post - the example you posted above, Edward, was EXTREMELY useful and it would be amazing to have this file documented and exported to the content library, as it fixed a number of issues I was having when trying to navigate the workflow on my own.

Firstly, the Autorig builder foe me was incredibly slow and almost unusable when I was trying it out on a newly generated Metahuman and after many attempts at getting it to work it still had visible errors on the output Base.shape. I tried the Autorig component that was in your example file and it just worked - but I'm still not fully sure why this one did versus what I was doing. I can see a few different tick boxes enabled/disabled and a couple of different tags written in the advanced sections, though I wouldn't have been able to figure these out without the help of this example file.

Secondly, the body and face animation subnets that are in the Example file were also very useful, and again would be great to have a bit of documentation about the how and why - as I'd successfully got animation to work directly on the skeleton when NOT using a rig, however when I added my own rig and the animation, I ended up with lots of horrific skeleton mangling. Again this little example fixed that up and allowed me to have my animation as well as the working rig to override it.

So thankyou for providing that file, and I hope this workflow gets a lot of love over the coming Houd updates as it sure feels like it's got a huge amount of potential!