Dynamically Morph Full Body Meta Humans and Skeletons

Changing the shape of a MetaHuman is easy. Changing the shape of a MetaHuman and its skeleton - dynamically, at runtime, without baking a separate character - is the part that usually sends people back to external tools. This guide shows how to morph a full-body MetaHuman and its bones together in Unreal Engine using Mesh Morpher, so a single character asset can shift between body types with a float variable.

The problem: morphs move vertices, not bones

A morph target only moves vertices. If your custom MetaHuman body is taller, heavier or differently proportioned than the original, the skeleton underneath still has the old proportions - so as soon as an animation plays, elbows and knees bend in the wrong places and the mesh distorts. To make a body morph animate correctly, the skeleton has to follow the shape.

Mesh Morpher solves this with two pieces: the Poser, which fits a skeleton to a morphed shape, and Bonesnapshots, which store that fitted skeleton so it can be loaded dynamically at runtime.

Step 1: Create the body morph targets

Sculpt your custom body shapes as morph targets. You can sculpt directly in Unreal with the Mesh Morpher Classic sculpt tools, or author the shapes in an external package like ZBrush and import them. This video covers creating the morph targets externally:

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

Step 2: Fit the skeleton with the Poser and generate Bonesnapshots

Open the Poser and procedurally generate Bonesnapshots by fitting the skeleton to each morph target. Mesh Morpher then updates the morph targets to reflect the deltas between the skeleton changes and the final desired shape - in other words, the morph keeps only the detail the bones cannot express. It sounds complicated, but the tool does the heavy lifting.

Step 3: Load Bonesnapshots at runtime - no baking

Nothing gets baked into a separate asset. Instead, use animation post-process blueprints on both the head and the body to Load Bonesnapshots and enable their corresponding morph targets. Because it all happens through the animation system, you can drive the entire transformation from gameplay logic - or from Sequencer, as in the video below, where a standard MetaHuman turns into a beast by animating one float value.

Step 4: Watch the full walkthrough

This tutorial takes you through the entire process end to end:

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

Tips

• Do the head and body separately. MetaHumans are split across components; each gets its own post-process blueprint that loads its Bonesnapshot and morph.
• Keep morph and snapshot names paired. One body shape = one morph target + one Bonesnapshot, enabled together.
• Blend gradually. Because nothing is baked, intermediate values of the float give you in-between bodies for free.
• Fix eyes and teeth afterwards. If components drift after extreme shapes, Relative Restore refits them in one click.

Where this fits

This workflow ships in Mesh Morpher Classic and works at runtime in packaged games - the runtime modules are pre-compiled and packageable. For extreme body shapes (the horse experiment is a fun example), see Extreme MetaHuman Deformations, and for wrapping a whole different character mesh onto MetaHuman topology, start with the 3D wrapping guide.