Studio and Graph
Getting Started
Studio is a standalone Windows application. Nothing else has to be installed first.
Install and activate
Studio is a standalone Windows application. Nothing else has to be installed first.
- 1
Download and run the installer
Sign in at meshmorpher.com and download the current Studio build from your account.
- 2
Launch it
The first launch opens the Mesh Morpher - Activation window: paste in your licence key and the machine is activated. A valid licence is required before the application opens.
- 3
Read the startup check
Mesh Morpher inspects your graphics device and says plainly if something will hold it back - an integrated card sharing system memory, an old driver, or less than 6 GB of graphics memory. Sculpting and the GPU deformers need DirectX 12 or DirectX 11 with Shader Model 5 or newer.
Graph is an in-editor plugin for Unreal Engine 5.6 to 5.8, Windows 64-bit.
- 1
Install the plugin
Install it for your engine version from your account or from the Fab listing, then enable MeshMorpherGraph in the project's plugin list and restart the editor.
- 2
Open the graph
Click the Mesh Morpher button on the Level Editor toolbar, or go to Window > Mesh Morpher > Mesh Morpher. It opens a tab called Mesh Morpher Graph.
- 3
Activate
The same licence window appears on first use. Paste in your key and the machine is activated.
Inside the editor you also get the fifteen editor-only nodes that read and write Unreal assets - Static Meshes, Skeletal Meshes, Texture assets and MetaHuman DNA. Every other node behaves identically in both products.
The window
Five panels, arranged however you like. Window switches them; drag a tab to redock it.
| Panel | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Graph | The canvas. Nodes, wires, comment boxes, the minimap and the search box. |
| Viewport | A 3D preview of whichever node is currently selected. |
| Target Viewport | A second preview, for comparing a result against a reference side by side. |
| Details | The selected node's Properties, and its Actions - the buttons that make an action node run. |
| Scene | The outliner: everything currently in the preview scene. |
| Agentic | The in-app AI assistant, which can read and edit the graph through the same actions you use by hand. |
Above them sit four menus - File, Edit, Window and Help - and the toolbar's New, Open, Save and Settings buttons.
Build your first graph
This one needs no files at all: Primitive arrives already carrying a mesh, so there is something to look at from the first click.
- 1
Start a new graph
File > New Graph, or pick New empty graph in the welcome dialog.
- 2
Add a Primitive node
Right-click anywhere on the canvas. The Add Node menu opens with the search box already focused - type
primitive, then click Primitive.Select it and pick a shape in Details. The viewport fills in immediately, because Primitive is a reactive node: there is no button to press.
- 3
Wire a Sculpt Mesh node onto it
Drag from Primitive's Mesh output pin and let go over empty canvas. The same menu opens, now filtered to Compatible with Mesh - so only nodes that can actually accept a mesh are offered. Choose Sculpt Mesh and it is placed and wired in one gesture.
- 4
Sculpt
Select the Sculpt Mesh node, pick a brush from the tool column, and pull the geometry around in the viewport. Press Accept when you are happy - that is what commits the strokes to the node's output.
- 5
Write it out
Drag from Sculpt Mesh's output, add Write FBX, then press its action button in Details and choose a destination. Export nodes never fire on their own - a graph should not write files while you are still editing it.
Three things that save an afternoon
Selecting a node is how you inspect it. The viewport always shows the output of the selected node, so clicking back along the chain is how you find the step that broke - not a debug mode, just selection.
Some nodes run themselves, others wait for you. Reactive nodes (Recompute Normals, Weld, Mesh Health) recompute whenever their input changes. Action nodes (Simplify, Generate UVs, Bake Maps, every exporter, Wrangle) do nothing at all until you click their button under Actions. If a node seems to be ignoring you, check the Details panel for a button.
An out-of-date output is kept, not cleared. Change the input of a node that has already produced a result and the old result stays on the pin, flagged as stale, until you re-run the node. In the app's own words: this node's output was computed from earlier input and is now out of date; it has been kept rather than overwritten. Nothing downstream empties out mid-edit - but do not mistake a stale preview for a fresh one.
Start from an example instead
The welcome dialog's Start from an example opens a set of complete, wired graphs that each solve one real job. Every one carries a note across the canvas telling you which button to press next, in order.
| Example | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Open a mesh file | The smallest useful graph. Point Load File Mesh at an FBX or OBJ and it appears in the preview; Recompute Normals then cleans up its shading on its own. |
| Sculpt a primitive | Needs no files. Create Primitive already carries a mesh, so select the Sculpt node, pick a brush from the tool column and start pulling geometry around. |
| Simplify and export FBX | Bring a dense scan or sculpt down to a triangle budget with UV islands and material sections intact, then write it out as FBX. |
| Generate UVs and bake maps | Give a low-poly a fresh UV atlas, project a high-poly's detail into it, and write the tangent-space normal map to disk. Tick more map types on the Bake node for AO, curvature or height. |
| Clean up a scan and export OBJ | The usual repair order for imported scan data: weld coincident vertices, fill the boundary holes that exposes, pack the index range, write an OBJ. |
| Symmetrize a scan | Wrap a scan onto its own mirror, blend half way, then last-mile Fix Symmetry. For raw photogrammetry whose two halves do not share vertices. |
| Fill a missing half | Align a scan onto X, then replace the missing half by mirroring the half that is there. |
| MetaHuman DNA to mesh | Read a .dna file straight off disk, build the neutral head mesh with its skeleton and skin weights at the LOD you pick, and export it. |
| Generate a LOD chain | Turn one dense mesh into a whole LOD chain in a single step. Every level is decimated from the original with UV islands and material sections intact, and the achieved triangle count of each level is reported so a budget that could not be met is visible. |
| Pack UVs and set texel density | Give a mesh a fresh UV atlas, repack its islands with a real gutter at the resolution you will bake at, then rescale them to your studio's texel density so this asset matches everything else in the set. |
| Inspect and repair a mesh | Measure a mesh's open edges, holes, floating islands, degenerate triangles and bowties, fill the holes, then measure again. Mesh Health passes the mesh straight through, so the second node reports exactly what the repair changed. |
| Retopologize a scan | Rebuild a scan's triangle soup as a clean quad-dominant mesh whose edges follow the surface flow, then give the result a fresh UV atlas and export it. Retopology replaces the topology, so the UVs are generated afterwards. |
| Project texture from a scan | Bake a scan's colour into a retopologised mesh's UV layout. The Coverage output shows which texels came from real scan data and which the fill invented, so you know exactly what still needs painting. |
| Retarget morph targets to another character | Move a whole morph target set (blendshapes) from one character's neutral onto another's, mapping every delta through a per-vertex local frame so it rotates and scales with the surface. The two neutrals must share topology - MetaHuman and DNA variants of one base do. |
| Cloth Drape | The smallest complete cloth setup: a flat plane draped over a sphere collider. Select the Simulation node and press Play to watch it fall and settle. |
| Garment: Two Panels | Two flat pattern pieces arranged facing each other over a sphere, ready to sew. Select the Sewing node and click matching boundary edges on both panels to sew the sides shut, then press Play on the Simulation node. |
| Flesh Jiggle | A soft-body sphere with no rig and no collider - the smallest possible flesh setup. Press Play on the Simulation node, then wire an Attachment Map or an Animation onto the Flesh Object once you want it held in place instead of falling freely. |
| Cloth Over Flesh | A plane of cloth draped over a soft-body sphere in one world. Press Play - cloth rides the flesh. The body falls until you attach it. |
| Animated Head | A flesh body ready to jiggle on an animated head. Wire your head mesh and an Animation into the Flesh Object; leave Attachment Map empty so the deep interior pins to the nearest bone. |
| Drape On Character | Cloth over a character collider. Wire your character into the Collider's Mesh, then an Animated Source (cache, frames, animation, or mesh) for a deforming body. End Frame raises itself to match the source the first time the sim configures. |
Saving and reopening
Graphs are .mmgraph files. File > Save writes one, File > Open reads one back, and File > Recent Files reopens the last few. The welcome dialog lists the same recents, so the graph you were working on yesterday is one click from launch.
Opening a graph is pure deserialization. No node runs, no script executes and no file is written just because you opened a document - the same rule that governs pasting a node or importing a preset.
Where to go next
| Introduction | How the two products relate, what a graph is, and a map of the node categories by task. | /pages/J2WQJY4yi9cL2yBikO2b |
| Wrangle | When no node does what you want: expressions, loops, donor meshes and a Python stage. | /pages/ijo3Z7vYLbtvQ02CJtaW |
| Wrangle examples | Ready-made recipes you can paste straight into the Code field. | /pages/YDkk3xP0r9z12iLrZELz |