Troubleshooting¶
Symptom, cause, fix for the handful of things that catch people out.
Assemble ran but no assembled folder appears¶
Symptom. You assembled the MetaHuman, the folder showed up in the Content Browser, but the exporter says it is not assembled, or the folder is gone after a restart.
Cause. Assembly builds the character's meshes, materials and Blueprint in memory. They show in the editor but are not written to disk until you save.
Fix. After assembling, File → Save All. Then export. An "assembly succeeded" message is not the same as saved to disk. When the exporter assembles for you, it opens the save dialog as soon as the assembly is done.
The export window warns about MetaHuman project settings¶
Symptom. A yellow warning box sits at the bottom of the export window, just above its buttons, or a prompt before the window opens, saying the project is missing project settings MetaHumans need. An FBX exported anyway brings the same box up again in the Export Complete window.
Cause. MetaHumans rely on a few skinning settings in the project. Unreal offers to turn them on when a MetaHuman first arrives in a project, and a project where that offer was dismissed, or never appeared, runs without them. Unreal then builds the character with extra vertices along hidden seams, and the FBX would carry them into Unity.
Fix. Click Set and Restart, in the prompt or in either box. The exporter turns the settings on and restarts the editor, which offers to save your work first. The character rebuilds itself when it next loads, so there is nothing to re-assemble. That first load takes a little longer.
If the box is still there after the restart, it says so and offers Open Project Settings instead of another restart. Turn on Support 16-bit Bone Index and Use Unlimited Bone Influences under Engine → Rendering → Skinning, and check whether another config file in the project turns them back off.
The Export MetaHuman menu is missing¶
Symptom. There is no Tools → Firecrest → Export MetaHuman. This is where it should be:
Cause. The plugin is installed but not enabled, usually because the project remembers an older copy being off.
Fix. Edit → Plugins, search FBX Exporter, tick FBX Exporter for MetaHumans, and restart the editor. See Installation.
Textures import at 2K in Unity when I wanted more¶
Symptom. The skin or clothing comes into Unity smaller than expected.
Cause. Either the Maximum Texture Size cap is set low, or the MetaHuman was assembled at that resolution. The exporter writes maps at the character's baked resolution and the cap can only lower them, never add detail.
Fix. Raise Maximum Texture Size in the Output group, and for the most detail set Texture Detail to FULL. If it is already high, re-assemble the MetaHuman at a higher texture quality so the baked maps themselves are larger, then export again.
The Unreal version plays a part as well. In our tests, 5.8 baked the head's colour map at 2K, and 5.7 baked everything at 8K without adding detail. See Skin Detail Across Unreal Versions.
Two characters clash, or one rebinds the other's textures¶
Symptom. Importing a second character into the same Unity project changes the first, or a character picks up the wrong textures.
Cause. Two MetaHumans share texture and material names. Something has to keep their Unity asset ids apart.
Fix. Keep GUID Uniqueness on FOLDER PERSISTENT (the default) and give each character its own output folder. Each folder then keeps its own ids, and the two live side by side.
Materials come in pink or unassigned¶
Symptom. The imported character is pink, or its slots are empty.
Cause. The FBX was imported on its own, away from its textures and materials folders, so Unity could not find them.
Fix. Import the whole output folder together, keeping the FBX beside its textures and materials folders. Do not move the FBX out on its own.
A duplicated MetaHuman assembles into the original's folder¶
Symptom. You duplicated a MetaHuman Character to make a variant, and assembling the copy produces no folder of its own, or it overwrites the original character's assembled assets.
Cause. A MetaHuman Character stores an Assembly Name, and a duplicate keeps the original's. Unreal's own Assemble button builds into a folder named after that stored name, so the copy lands in the original's folder.
Fix. Open the character, and in its Assembly settings set the Assembly Name to the character's own name before assembling. Exporting through the plugin already uses the correct name and warns you in the Output Log when a character's Assembly Name does not match, so watch for that line.
MetaHumans turn grey in Unreal 5.8¶
Symptom. In Unreal 5.8 a MetaHuman's skin, eyes or teeth show as plain grey clay, in the MetaHuman editor and sometimes wherever the character appears. Downloading the textures again changes nothing.
Cause. An issue in Unreal 5.8 on computers set to a region that writes decimals with a comma, as Greek, German, French and most European settings do. Once the MetaHuman editor has opened in a session, some materials Unreal builds after that fail, and Unreal draws them with its grey default material instead. The textures themselves are fine, and materials that were built before the editor opened keep working. The Output Log lists each one that failed, in a warning that it failed to compile.
Fix. Have Unreal build those materials before the MetaHuman editor opens. Restart Unreal, and before opening any MetaHuman, open each material the Output Log named, so that Unreal builds it, then wait for the shader count in the bottom right corner to finish. The MetaHuman should then open with its textures. The MetaHuman editor's own materials sit in the MetaHuman plugin's content, which the Content Browser shows once Show Plugin Content is ticked in its settings. Unreal keeps a material once it is built, so this is needed again only when the materials are rebuilt, after an engine update for example.
If that is not enough, switch Windows to a decimal point. In Windows' region settings, set the decimal symbol to a point, then restart Unreal. This always works, but every other program on the computer shows decimals with a point as well until you change it back.
Dark bands or blotches across the skin¶
Symptom. Under a spot light the face carries dark streaks that run in one direction, often filling the eye sockets and trailing down the cheeks and neck. They ignore the shape of the face, and they move when the light moves.
Cause. The light's shadow map is too coarse for a close-up. A wide cone spreads that map over a large volume, so each of its pixels lands large on the face, and the light shadows parts of the face that should be lit. Soft shadows then smear the mistake into bands.
Fix. Raise that light's shadow resolution. In URP the per-light quality tiers stop at 1024, so set the light's shadow resolution to Custom and pick 2048 or 4096. Narrowing the cone helps as well, since the same map then covers less ground. If you reach for the bias sliders first, note that a light ignores its own bias values while Use Pipeline Settings is ticked.
Skin looks pink on HDRP Subsurface¶
Symptom. You chose HDRP SUBSURFACE for the skin, the export ran, and in Unity the face and body render pink.
Cause. HDRP applies subsurface scattering only through a diffusion profile, and only once your project lists that profile. The first Subsurface export into a project writes one, MetaHuman Skin Diffusion Profile, beside the materials, but the list belongs to your project, so the export cannot add to it. Until the profile is listed, HDRP falls back to its default diffusion profile, which is tinted pink. Unity says so in a warning under the material's Diffusion Profile field.
Fix. Select the skin material and press Fix beside Diffusion Profile. That adds the profile to your HDRP Global Settings, and the body follows, since it shares the same profile. Every later export into the project uses the listed profile, so you do this once. A Diffusion Profile Override on a Volume in your scene works as well.
If the warning comes back on a later character, the export found no copy of its profile in your project, most often because the folder was exported outside it and copied in afterwards. Press Fix again, or point that character's skin and body materials at the profile already listed. HDRP holds at most 15 diffusion profiles in a project, so there is no reason to keep more than one.
Worth knowing either way: URP cannot do this at all. Its Lit shader has no subsurface term, so a face rendered on URP will always read a little harder in the creases than the same face in Unreal.
The clothes or skin look inflated or wrong¶
Symptom. Surfaces look puffed up or lit oddly compared with Unreal, most visible on the clothes.
Cause. Unreal and Unity read a normal map's green channel in opposite directions, so a map taken straight from Unreal is inverted in Unity.
Fix. Leave Normal Map Handling on AUTO (FAST) (the default), which flips the maps for Unity. If a single map still looks wrong, set it to FORCE ON or FORCE OFF in the Normal Maps list under Resolved MetaHuman Data. If your pipeline ignores Unity's import flag, use AUTO (SLOW) to bake the flip into the images instead.
Hair looks different from Unreal¶
Symptom. The hair, beard or brows read lighter, flatter, paler or more even in colour than they do in Unreal, most of all on URP.
Cause. Unreal draws a MetaHuman's hair strand by strand, with shading made for hair: light passes through it, and the hair around each strand keeps some of the light from it. Unity's standard materials have nothing like that, URP's least of all, so the same colours land differently. The exporter carries the hair's own colours across and paints in some of its depth, but hair, beards and brows are unlikely ever to match Unreal exactly on these materials. Bringing them closer is part of the work from this beta to the full release.
Fix. Tune the look in the Hair group before you export, or with Update Existing once you have. Brightness sets how light the hair reads, Richness how deep and warm its colour, Root Shadow how much darker it grows toward the roots, and Steady Depth keeps that depth whatever lights it. On HDRP, the HDRP Hair material is built for hair and should come closest. See Hair.
HDRP comes close to Unreal, but not quite¶
Symptom. On HDRP the character looks close to Unreal, but the skin, hair or clothes read a little off.
Cause. HDRP's materials can come closer to Unreal than URP's, but in this beta their defaults have had less fine tuning than URP's.
Fix. Tune the look before you export. For the skin, choose HDRP SUBSURFACE and register its diffusion profile, as in Skin looks pink on HDRP Subsurface. For the hair, try HDRP HAIR, then Brightness and Root Shadow. The two Glossiness settings decide how much the skin and the clothes shine. If a default looks wrong on your character, tell us, since that is exactly what the beta is for.
Still stuck¶
Questions are welcome at support@facecue.net.