Edit Unreal Engine MetaHumans in Blender with the Blender MetaHuman DNA add-on

MetaHuman is Epic Game's impressive face animator and editor for Unreal Engine. With this new add-on by Poly Hammer, you'll be able to edit these models inside Blender and send them back to UE for rendering.

Poly Hammer writes:

Get ready to fully customize your Metahumans in Blender! Our new addon allows you to import DNA files and offers a seamless 1-to-1 integration with the face board rig logic, just like in Unreal Engine. Now, you can work in Blender and effortlessly push changes back to your Unreal project in 1-click!

The addon is for creating custom Metahumans in unreal. Having Riglogic working in blender is to help artists author the correct adjustments to shape keys, skin weights and wrinkle maps. Not for rendering.

You can import your facial customizations onto your blueprint that has a body. But currently the addon is scoped to editing just the face since that is the most complex part of the workflow when creating custom metahumans. But depending on interest we could make a “1-click” workflow for the body as well.

Given the restricions on MetaHuman, it looks like the installation process will be a bit more complicated than the average Blender add-on:

RigLogic module that unreal provides. Metahuman licensing isn’t super permissive, but is cleared for internal production use, so we have a build tool that can compile rig logic as well as the DNA modules into the addon. This is something you have to do yourself, but we have made it super easy with docker images and a GitHub workflow that you can just fork and run to pull the needed code and build for your own production.

The MetaHuman DNA is still in development, but you can get this add-on for free when released if you sign up on their site and re-share the announcement on LinkedIn or X.