How To Use Metahuman Creator

The MetaHuman Creator provides a way to create your own digital human representations in an intuitive and easy-to-learn environment. Creating the look of your digital human consists of editing broad and fine details that are divided into key attributes, such as the face, hair, eyes, and body.

This guide walks through all of the attributes you can use to edit and create your own digital humans with the MetaHuman Creator along with exploring the editing, quality, and lighting controls needed to preview your MetaHuman character.

Title Bar
MetaHuman Attributes and Properties Selection
Viewport Lighting and Quality Settings
Viewport Rendered Preview of MetaHuman
Keyboard Hotkey Reference
Viewport Sculpting and Animation Controls Toolbar

When initially opening the MetaHuman Creator, you are presented with two tabs: Create MetaHumans and My MetaHumans. You can select a MetaHuman Preset to work from, or continue working on one you've previously selected and started modifying.

Choosing a MetaHuman Preset

The MetaHuman Creator provides a number of MetaHuman Presets as starting points to choose from. They include a diverse group of starting points for different body figures, genders, and ethnicities.

Start by selecting a MetaHuman Preset from the Create MetaHuman panel.

Once you've selected a character, use the preview to inspect that character. You can use the following controls:

Left-click and drag to rotate the character.
Mouse wheel to zoom in and out.
Middle mouse button to pan or rotate the camera around the character.

When you've made your selection, click the Next button to create an instance of this Preset to start editing. All edits will be automatically saved to your My MetaHumans gallery.

Your Preset will load in the creator tool where you can start editing and changing properties. The top-most toolbar is the MetaHuman Title Bar. Here you can go back to the home screen and select a different Preset, or choose one you've previously worked on. You can edit the name of your MetaHuman, which carries over to Quixel Bridge when you export to another application. You can also use the arrows to undo / redo an previous action.

Modifying a Previously Created MetaHuman

Any MetaHuman Presets you start editing automatically save an instance of them to your My MetaHumans gallery. From there you can choose to edit, duplicate, or delete them from the creator.

When you want to continue work on a MetaHuman in your gallery, select them and choose Edit Selected.

MetaHumans that you create are associated with your Epic Games account. This means that when you sign in with Quixel Bridge, you can download their source assets to your computer and export downloaded MetaHumans to Unreal Engine or Maya.

At the bottom of the My MetaHumans gallery are the Delete and Duplicate buttons. Use these buttons to remove any MetaHumans you no longer want or need, or choose to duplicate ones that you want to iterate on or create a variation of.

The Face controls provide properties relevant to the attributes of the face. You have control over regional facial characteristics, skin tone and accents, eye color and look, teeth shape and style, and a selection of makeup styles to apply to the MetaHumans you create.

For details about these properties and their usage, see the MetaHuman Creator Face Controls.

The Viewport Controls and Toolbar provides access to lighting and quality options along with a dedicated toolbar to sculpt and play animations on your MetaHuman characters.

Use the lighting and quality controls to test your MetaHuman in differently lit environments with different quality settings for lighting Level Of Detail (LOD) of the MetaHuman character mesh. The viewport toolbar contains various editing controls for your MetaHuman to add regional influence through control points and blend targets, sculpt and move parts of the facial topography for large and small changes, and play animations on your MetaHuman.

For details about these properties and their usage, see the MetaHuman Creator Viewport Controls and Toolbar.

The Hair controls provide a selection of styles to choose from and properties relevant to the attributes of hair on your character's head. You have control over defining the type of hair style for head, eyebrows, eyelashes, beard, and mustache for the MetaHumans you create.