[Virtual Production] Skeletal Meshes, Materials, Textures, and Blueprints

Continued from this post.

I finally figured out how to use Blueprints. It had been bothering me to no end that the characters I created in MakeHuman did not seem to display all their textures when imported into UE4. Specifically, my eyes were all black and my eyelashes were unnatural–though stylish–black chunks.

EEYUGH!

After poking around in the documentation to no avail, I finally got the brilliant idea to google “unreal black eyes.” The first article returned had my answer:

connect the alpha channel with “opacity mask” + choose “masked” at the blend mode

fighter5347 from the Unreal forums

But where the devil was this fabled “opacity mask” and how did I set the material’s blend mode? ‘Twas nowhere to be found in the details panel. But wait! I could double click on the material in the Content Panel and lo and behold:

I could apply this to all the materials I had imported for my character: the eyelashes, eyes, and eyebrows. I even fiddled with the hair to make it 2-sided so if you got close to the character it wouldn’t have a weird gray underside.

Not the picture of death itself!

An odd discovery I made as a result of this is that the files for Ninja Mary and Bodysuit Mary imported differently.

All the assets for Ninja Mary
All the assets for Bodysuit Mary–notice the extra objects

Regardless, at least I finally got it to look the way it was intended:

Music courtesy of Kevin Ceballo