MetaHuman → Godot Look-Dev

⚠️ Not an Epic Games or Godot Foundation product. This is an independent, community tool made by Agile Lens. It is not created, published, endorsed, sponsored by, or affiliated with Epic Games or the Godot Foundation, and is not official MetaHuman, Unreal Engine, or Godot software. The repository name "MetaHumanGodot" describes what the tool works with — it does not imply any official support from either organisation. "MetaHuman", "Unreal Engine", and "Unreal" are trademarks of Epic Games, Inc. "Godot" is a trademark of the Godot Foundation. See Licensing.

A real-time look-development tool for MetaHuman characters in Godot 4.6 — dial in skin, lighting, and hair with live sliders and an orbit camera, then save the look to JSON. Built around the MatMADNESS HumanShader (MIT) for proper subsurface-scattering skin.

Bring your own MetaHuman. This repo ships the tooling — the Godot project, the look-dev UI, and the skin/eye/hair shaders. It does not include any MetaHuman character assets. You supply your own export (see Bring your own MetaHuman). Without one, the tool launches with a neutral placeholder so you can still explore the lighting and skin sliders.

Download

A prebuilt Windows demo (with a sample MetaHuman baked in) is on the Releases page — download MetaHumanGodot-win64.zip, unzip, and run MetaHumanGodot.exe. Or build/run from source (below).

The interactive tool	Live expressions

Features

• Live skin look-dev — MatMADNESS subsurface-scattering skin with ~30 exposed uniforms (normal/SSS/smoothness, micro-detail, scatter, roughness, specular, AO…), each on a slider and a type-in box (values can exceed the slider range).
• 3-point lighting + environment — key / fill / rim (energy, color, yaw, pitch), catchlight, ambient/exposure/tonemap/contrast/saturation, backdrop tint.
• Hair — scalp / beard / eyebrow colors, strand density, root darkening, backing shell.
• Orbit camera + auto-turntable (spins the model), a hero camera (wide→close push-in), and Play animation (face emote + body idle) — all combinable. Supersampled screenshot and turntable-movie capture.
• Save / load the whole look to look_settings.json.

Quick start

1. Install Godot 4.6 (stable, Forward+).
2. Launch the viewer:
   • Windows: double-click run_lookdev.bat (set the GODOT env var to your Godot binary if it isn't on PATH), or
   • Any OS: from a terminal —

     <godot-binary> --path <path-to-this-folder> scenes/look_dev.tscn --resolution 1366x860
     

     Use an absolute project path (a bare relative --path godot_project fails with "Invalid project path specified").
3. With no character.glb present you'll see a placeholder bust — the skin and lighting sliders still work. Add your own MetaHuman (next section) for the full rig.

Do not launch with --headless or --write-movie — this is an interactive GPU tool.

Controls

Action	Input
Orbit	LMB-drag
Zoom	mouse wheel
Pan	RMB / MMB-drag
Reset camera	Reset cam button
Spin the model	Auto-turntable toggle
Play face + body animation	Play animation toggle
Hero camera (wide → close, loops)	Hero camera toggle
Resize / collapse the panel	drag the right-edge handle, or the ‹‹ button
Reset one setting to default	the small ↺ next to it
Hide / show UI	H key (or Hide UI button)
Credits / legal	Credits / Legal button (top-right)
Screenshot	bottom-right Screenshot
Turntable movie	bottom-right Capture movie

The turntable, animation, and hero camera can all run at once. Every slider has a numeric entry box (type values beyond the slider range for extremes). Save settings writes look_settings.json (next to the app and to user://); it auto-loads on the next launch.

Bring your own MetaHuman

Export your MetaHuman from Unreal Engine and assemble it into a single character.glb placed at the project root (character.glb), with its baked textures alongside (head/body BaseColor, Normal, SRMF, Scatter; eye iris/sclera; groom coverage atlases). The viewer auto-wires the face by surface index (Blender's glTF export shuffles material names), the body skin, grooms, and eyes. (The full, automated UE → Blender → Godot export pipeline — which produces that character.glb for you, including ARKit morph targets — is a separate offering; see below.)

Licensing

• This tool's code + shaders: see LICENSE (MatMADNESS shaders are MIT).
• MetaHuman assets are NOT included and must not be added to this repo. Epic's MetaHuman license (June 2025+) permits MetaHumans in non-Unreal engines for users under $1M USD revenue, with restrictions (notably no AI-model training). When you supply your own MetaHuman, you do so under your Epic license — read metahuman.com/license and the Unreal Engine EULA. This note is not legal advice.

The full pipeline

This viewer is the open, free slice. The complete UE → Blender → Godot automation (one-shot export of the face/body/grooms, surface remapping, shader wiring, ARKit/animation setup) is a separate, more involved offering. If you want the turnkey workflow rather than hand-assembling character.glb, that's where to look.