In this recorded video tutorial, animator and Animation Mentor mentor Nicole Gregory breaks down MetaHuman Creator, Epic’s tool for building realistic digital characters, and shows the full path from a blank character template to a rigged, animated game character moving inside Unreal Engine.
Meet Nicole Gregory
Nicole has worked on a range of game styles and genres; from third person shooters to mountain biking to character selection screens. She is currently an Animator working at Third Kind Games – A Virtuos Studio, working on MTB Mavrix.
Nicole mentors students in the 6-week Game Animation Fundamentals course at Animation Mentor and is also an alum of our 3D Character Animation program and Creature Animation courses.
Why MetaHuman is worth learning
Nicole opens by pointing out that most realistic-looking characters you see in games today are built with MetaHuman, simply because of how much customization it allows right inside Unreal Engine. She shows a before and after: a blank gray character model on one side, and a fully personalized version on the other that she put together in about two minutes. Her point is that you can build a character you love, whether that’s an original design or a version of yourself, and then actually animate it.
The tutorial follows one full pipeline: build the character in MetaHuman, bring it into Maya to animate, then send it back into Unreal Engine for either cinematics or gameplay.
Getting your tools set up
Before touching the fun part, Nicole walks through the prep work, which she admits is the less exciting half. There are three things to get in place: download Advanced Skeleton, get the Metahuman for Maya plugin, and confirm that the right plugins are enabled inside Unreal Engine itself.
Advanced Skeleton is the tool that takes the rig MetaHuman generates and converts it into something animators can actually work with and recognize in Maya. Nicole compares it to converting a file from one format to another: the information transfers over, just in a shape you can use. She also recommends checking that Metahuman for Maya is only enabled on projects that need it, since MetaHuman data can take up a lot of storage.
Once everything is downloaded and the Unreal plugins (including the MetaHuman Creator option) are checked and applied, the setup is done and doesn’t need to be repeated for future projects.
Designing your own character
With prep out of the way, Nicole creates a new MetaHuman character directly in Unreal and shows just how much control the tool gives you. You can adjust gender presentation, body type, and height, tweak individual features like nose shape or cheek fullness, and choose from template designs if you’d rather start from something similar to what you want.
For her demo character, nicknamed Bo, Nicole works through hairstyles, eyebrows, skin tone, and even material details like skin roughness and tone shifts. She treats it like designing a character in a video game’s customization screen, except the result is a character built specifically for animation.
Building the rig
Once a character design feels finished, the next step is exporting it so it can actually move. Nicole sets the export target to DCC export and picks an output folder that’s easy to find later, since that folder will need to be located again inside Maya.
From there, she clicks create full rig, which adds the joints and bones needed to bring the character to life, and downloads the character’s textures at whichever resolution fits the project (higher resolution looks better in close-up cinematics but takes up significantly more storage).
Back in Maya, the character assembler pulls in that folder to load the character, complete with face controls. At this point the mesh exists, but there aren’t yet any body controls to animate with, which is where Advanced Skeleton comes back in. Using its name matcher tool, Nicole builds a working, constrained skeleton from the MetaHuman rig, turning it into something she can actually pose and animate.
Animating and exporting for Unreal
With a working rig, Nicole moves into blocking out an animation, in her example a punch. She notes that MetaHuman characters are split into two parts, body and face, and for this workflow she’s only animating and exporting the body.
To export correctly, she selects the root joint and its full hierarchy, since that’s what carries the animation data, then exports it as an FBX with baked animation. Baking keys every frame so Unreal reads the motion accurately. For any game animation, she flags 30 frames per second as the standard to stick to.
Bringing it back into Unreal Engine
The exported FBX gets dragged directly into Unreal, where you choose the default MetaHuman body skeleton and import only the animation data, not the full character. Since the character (the “puppet,” as Nicole calls it) already exists in the engine, the imported animation reflects onto it directly, creating a usable animation sequence.
From that point, the character is ready for cinematics through Sequencer or gameplay through Blueprints. Nicole closes by noting this is just an entry point. Face capture, Live Link performance capture, and deeper animation work are all avenues to explore once you’re comfortable with this base pipeline.
Nicole mentors this exact Maya-to-Unreal workflow in Animation Mentor’s Game Animation Fundamentals course, a 6 week workshop for anyone who wants hands-on guidance moving a character from Maya into a playable Unreal Engine build.
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