Tutorial — Skinning Garments and Props to a MetaHuman

Augmented Traveler local tutorial. Back to Maya — Tutorials · tool references: ngSkinTools — Tutorials

How to skin a period garment or prop to the MetaHuman body skeleton in Maya using Skin Tools (Maya 2027, built on ngSkinTools) or the ngSkinTools 2 plugin (Maya 2026), then bring it into Unreal so it follows the character.

Draft. Written from the ngSkinTools and Autodesk documentation. Validate on the first test garment and correct menu names and settings here.

1. When to use this, and when not

Use this tutorial for Don't use it for
Rigid or semi-rigid accessories: spectacles, cap, bonnet brim, apron, collar, cuffs, belt, watch chain The MetaHuman body or face. Never repaint MetaHuman skin weights; the rig (RigLogic, correctives) depends on them
Garments that won't go through the Marvelous Designer → Cloth Asset → Outfit pipeline Garments that can use that pipeline; it resizes automatically (Marvelous Designer to MetaHuman — Considerations)
Props with their own joints (telescope on a swivel, ledger with a hinged cover) Hair and grooms (bound with a Groom Binding in Unreal)
Fixing clothing deformation when Unreal's automatic Transfer Skin Weights isn't good enough Secondary body shapes (use the Pose Editor in MetaHuman for Maya)

Body shape breaking under the garment at the shoulders or elbows? That is a body-corrective job: see Tutorial — Pose Editor Correctives for Period Tailoring.

2. Prerequisites

3. Prepare the scene

  1. Open the Character Assembler scene. Identify the body skeleton root and the body mesh.
  2. Import the garment. Freeze transformations and delete history. Check scale matches the body.
  3. Check the garment topology: no n-gons in deforming areas, edge loops at elbows, shoulders, waist and knees, and no faces intersecting the body in the A-pose.
  4. Name it clearly (e.g. AT_Mitchell_1847_bodice_GEO). Save as a new version.

4. Bind

  1. Select only the joints the garment needs (for a bodice: spine, clavicles, upper arms, neck; not fingers or face joints), then the garment.
  2. Bind Skin with:
    • Bind method: Closest distance
    • Weight distribution: Neighbors
    • Max influences: start low (1–2) for a clean, predictable base
    • Maintain max influences: off (it removes the small blending weights you want to keep)
    • Remove unused influences: off
  3. Open Skin Tools (Maya 2027) or the ngSkinTools 2 window, select the garment, and initialize skinning layers.

From here on, only edit weights through layers. Painting with Maya's standard Paint Skin Weights tool on a layered mesh gets overwritten when layers recompute.

5. Build the layers

Work bottom to top. Each layer covers one job.

Layer Purpose How
Base (safety) Guarantees every vertex has weight 100% opacity, no mask; flood the main parent joint (e.g. spine for a bodice, head for a cap)
Transfer Borrow the body's deformation Copy weights from the MetaHuman body to the garment (closest point on surface), then paste into this layer; mask out areas that should stay stiffer than skin
Torso and shoulders Clean shoulder and chest behavior Paint with a mask limited to the upper body; use a "bleed zone" (paint slightly past the area, then mask back) for soft edges
Sleeves Elbow folds without collapse Paint upper-arm / lower-arm split; add twist joints if the MetaHuman skeleton provides them
Stiff areas Collars, cuffs, buttons, brims Push toward a single influence so they move rigidly
Mirror Symmetry Enable the mirror effect on the relevant layers; set the mirror axis and confirm _l / _r joint pairing

Tools inside layers:

6. Test through a range of motion

Create a short test animation on the body skeleton (or reuse a MetaHuman range-of-motion clip):

Fix problems layer by layer: collapsing volume (add smoothing or twist influence), poke-through (adjust weights, or offset the garment slightly outward), stiff stretching (more influences in the transition).

7. Clean up for Unreal

  1. Prune tiny weights (below about 0.01).
  2. Limit influences per vertex to the target platform. 4 is a safe target for the Optimized (Quest/phone) assembly; the kiosk (Cine) build can use more. Confirm the project's skin-weight settings.
  3. Keep the layered source file. Export a baked copy (layers flattened into the skinCluster) for Unreal.
  4. Export FBX: the garment + the body skeleton only; no body mesh, no face joints unless needed; centimetres; include skin weights.

8. Bring it into Unreal

  1. Import the FBX as a Skeletal Mesh, choosing the MetaHuman body skeleton as the skeleton (do not create a new one).
  2. Assign period materials.
  3. Add it to the character as a skeletal mesh component that follows the body (leader pose / follower component setup) so it plays the same animation.
  4. Test in the kiosk build (Cine) and the Quest build (Optimized). Check the orbit test and the seated pose.
  5. Record the version in the character's change log.

9. Checklist

10. Troubleshooting

Symptom Likely cause Fix
Edits disappear after touching layers Weights were painted with standard Maya tools Redo the edit inside a layer
Garment explodes in Unreal Wrong skeleton selected on import Re-import on the MetaHuman body skeleton
Shoulder collapses when the arm lifts Too few influences across the shoulder Widen the transition in the torso layer; smooth
Mirror side is wrong Joint pairing not recognized Check _l / _r naming in the mirror settings
Fine on kiosk, broken on Quest Influence limit trimmed key weights Re-weight with the platform limit in mind
Cap slides on the head Too many influences on a rigid prop Single influence (head) in the stiff layer

Maya — Tutorials · ngSkinTools — Tutorials · MetaHuman for Maya — Considerations · Marvelous Designer to MetaHuman — Considerations · Stage 2 — Likeness and Body Skills