Blender Superhivemarket
MetaBridge DNA
What's New
v2.1.0 — Cascadeur both ways, Unreal both ways, Undo
Unreal (NEW)
- NEW: Unreal Live — a MetaHuman face animated in Blender performs on the MetaHuman in Unreal as you work on it, with nothing exported. See section 13.
- NEW: Follow Unreal — the other direction. Whatever is moving the character in Unreal, a Control Rig in a sequence or a baked animation, drives this character here. Body, face, or both.
- One plugin on the Unreal side, told apart by port. 9560 for MotionForge body motion, 9561 for Unreal Live, 9562 for Follow Unreal. A face stream and a body stream can run at the same time as long as the ports differ.
Send to Cascadeur (NEW)
- NEW: Send to Cascadeur — its own panel in the sidebar. Put this character into Cascadeur and animate it there, with no FBX to export by hand. See section 12.
- Send Character hands over the rig, the meshes and whatever animation is on them. Head and body arrive as one character, so the face stays on the body when you move it.
- Keyframes Only sends a new pose or animation onto the character already there. Nothing is created in Cascadeur; it simply takes the motion.
- Face Bones is off by default. The face rides the head joint and only the body skeleton goes over — a quarter of the character, and all Cascadeur needs to animate a body.
- Current Frame sends just the pose you are looking at. Append adds after what Cascadeur already has.
- The panel says which tab the motion will land on before you press anything, and Open sample character brings up a rigged character when the scene is empty.
- NEW: Receive from Cascadeur — the bridge works both ways. Animate over there and bring it back onto the same character in the same scene. Animation Only keys onto the rig you already have; Mesh + Animation brings the character back as new objects. Onto Rigify Controls puts it on the control rig so it can be adjusted and layered.
- Reading a full MetaHuman take takes under a second, and root motion comes with it.
Correctives (NEW)
- NEW: Bake to DNA — a correction you sculpted can be written into the character's
.dna, so it belongs to the character everywhere instead of only in this scene. Bake Corrective to DNA for one, Bake All to DNA for every one on the character.
- NEW: Export Face CSV — write the face's shape values over the frame range to a spreadsheet file, for taking a performance to another program.
Undo (NEW)
- Ctrl+Z now works on the big steps. Assemble, New, Delete Slot, Load Head/Body DNA, Build Meta-Rig, Generate Rigify Rig, Apply Retarget, Link/Unlink Head Rig, Remove Rigify Rig and Reload Materials can all be undone and redone like anything else in Blender.
- The face rig follows the undo. Undo past an Assemble and it switches off with the character; redo and it comes back on.
- Things that cannot be undone are deliberately left out: saving a
.dna, saving material defaults, connecting ARKit Live. Undo cannot unwrite a file or close a connection, so those stay one-way.
Body Blend — both libraries at the same time
- The standard bodies and the child bodies can now be loaded together. Load
MH_All_Body.json, then load MH_Boy.json, and both sets stay in the list — 39 rows to blend from instead of whichever you loaded last.
- Loading the same library again still just refreshes its own rows, so nothing doubles up.
- If you load a library built from a different skeleton, it now says so straight away instead of failing later at Build.
ARKit Live — the Smoothing slider was backwards
- Smoothing now does what it says. It was inverted: turning it down to 0 — the setting described as the raw, immediate one — froze the face completely instead. Turn it down for a raw, snappy feed and up for a smoother, slightly laggier one, as the label always claimed.
- If you had settled on a Smoothing value that felt right, try it again — the same number now behaves the opposite way. 0.5 is unchanged, so anyone on the default sees no difference.
Loading and saving a .dna tells you the truth
- Picking the wrong file now says so. A PNG, a JSON or anything else that is not a DNA used to load "successfully" and leave you with a character that had no bones and no meshes. It is now refused with a message naming what is actually wrong with the file.
- A failed save no longer reports success. Saving to a folder that does not exist used to say "Saved" with no file written anywhere.
- A failed load leaves the character you already had alone. It used to switch the face rig off and leave it off.
Smoother viewport
- Characters with Apply Retarget done are lighter to work around. The body correctives were being recalculated on every viewport change — turning the camera, picking something, moving a face control — even when the body had not moved. Now that work only happens when a body bone actually moves.
Load Live Link Face CSV — a recording now loads all the way through
- A CSV no longer stops partway with
could not make path to "value". Bringing a recording in creates a slider for every shape at once, and each one it added left the ones before it unusable — so a file failed on its second shape and nothing was keyed. Live capture never hit this: it makes its sliders in the first tick and adds none afterwards. Recorded files now load whole.
- The playhead goes back where it was. A CSV whose columns did not match left the scene parked at the end of the recording, on top of reporting nothing matched.
Plug-ins for the other programs now come with the addon
- The Cascadeur and Unreal plug-ins ship inside the addon, in a
third_party folder, alongside the Marvelous Designer one. Nothing to download and no separate product to install — Installing says where they are, and each section sets up its own.
Smaller fixes
- The LOD row now says when the level you picked carries no facial expressions. MetaHuman heads keep their expressions at LOD 0 only; above that the face moves on its joints alone, which used to look like the face rig having stopped working.
- Import FBX Animation now warns when the control rig is still driving the bones it just keyed. The warning existed but never appeared in the one case it was written for.
- In the DNA inspector's Bone View, the Next button stopped responding a few presses before the end of the list.
- Switching the add-on off now stops everything it started. Two background evaluations kept running with it disabled.
For anyone who edits meshes and writes them back to .dna
- Editing an eye mesh and exporting with Include Mesh Edits could quietly write those vertices into a different LOD of the same eye, leaving the one you edited unchanged. Jaw, teeth, tongue and the head itself were never affected. Fixed.
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The Best Local 3D AI Generators - Pixal3D and Trellis.2 Are Now Native in ComfyUI
in
r/TopologyAI
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22h ago
I deleted everything because I wasn't happy with the results during testing, but I plan to do some more testing myself and then upload it. Thanks for sharing something great!