Hello Baker: Our UE5.6 Metahuman in Houdini

 Our UE5.6 Metahuman in Houdini

Rat Trap Project Post 5 : Meet Baker Girl

In a stroke of perfect timing, Epic Games recently announced that Metahumans can now be used across any DCC tool—not just Unreal Engine. For The Rat Trap, this was a game-changer.

From the start, my focus wasn’t on crafting characters from scratch. The goal of this project has always been about world-building, animation, and FX—pushing what’s possible in Houdini Solaris with procedural workflows, USD, and MaterialX. Character work could be outsourced or adapted. So when Unreal 5.6 rolled out the new in-engine Metahuman Creator, offering the ability to customize both body and head within a unified framework, I knew I had exactly what I needed.

I already had earlier versions of Metahumans from previous experiments, and I was able to adapt those into the new system. For hair, I streamlined the process using existing Houdini grooms, bypassing the need to wrangle complex hair exports from Unreal.

Getting the Metahuman into Houdini, however, wasn’t without its challenges. While Maya users benefit from a functional Metahuman DNA import process, Houdini isn’t quite there yet. So I went the old-school route—exporting FBX assets of both head and body and merging them manually inside Houdini. It worked. No drama, just pragmatism.. My plan is to build an APEX rig for both the body and the head blendshapes, enabling me to take full advantage of Houdini’s new animation workflow powered by APEX. I’ll dive into that process in a future post, where I’ll explore rigging workflows and how they integrate with the rest of The Rat Trap pipeline.

The next step after importing the Metahuman into Houdini was to design my character’s clothing—a part I’ve been excited to test for a while. I used my custom Houdini HDA, which automatically takes a character’s measurements and generates basic garments procedurally. For now, I’ve used it to outfit my Metahuman baker with simple, functional clothing. But the long-term goal is much more ambitious: I want this tool to eventually allow designers to choose from different garment types, apply styling options, and simulate cloth behavior—all seamlessly within Houdini’s procedural ecosystem.

With this pipeline now in place, I have my character—the Baker—fully inside Houdini Solaris.

Next week, I’ll dive into the process of assigning and managing materials for the Metahuman in Solaris, and some of the things I wish I knew before jumping in.

#TheRatTrap #PaitanMedia #NigerianAnimation #AfricanVFX #3DModeling #USD #MaterialX #Solaris #Houdini #PipelineDesign #InnovationInAfrica #ExperimentalAnimation #LearningByDoing #AnimationNigeria, #UnrealEngine, #UE56, #Metahuman