Custom Meta Humans in UEFN

UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite) supports MetaHumans - but with a catch that breaks most customization workflows: the optimized MetaHumans used in UEFN ship without morph targets, and the post-process animation blueprint techniques that drive morphs in standard Unreal projects are not available there. If your custom MetaHuman relies on morphs, it arrives in UEFN with a stock face.

The workaround: put the customization in the DNA

What UEFN does carry through is the MetaHuman DNA - including its bone expressions. So the path to a custom MetaHuman in UEFN is to express your customization as DNA bone data instead of morph data:

1. Customize the body, head shape and skeleton with Mesh Morpher - sculpt or wrap your shapes as usual.
2. Convert sculpted shapes into bone expressions. Mesh Morpher generates bone-driven DNA expressions from morph targets automatically, so the customization survives without a single morph.
3. Bake into the DNA and bring the character into UEFN.

The video tutorial goes through the whole process:

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

Tips

• Keep shapes bone-friendly. Bones reproduce smooth, regional changes well; very fine surface detail belongs in textures and normals in this pipeline.
• Verify expressions after conversion. Check blinks and mouth shapes on the converted character - fix any misbehaving expression by editing its DNA bones directly.
• The same trick helps everywhere morphs are expensive. Crowds, mobile targets and any memory-constrained platform benefit from bone-driven customization, UEFN or not.

Tools used

Everything here ships in Mesh Morpher Classic - the expression generation, DNA editing and baking all run inside Unreal Engine, or outside it in Mesh Morpher Studio.