MetaHuman Rig Transfer

A Python script that fits the MetaHuman facial rig to a new head mesh inside Maya — written years before Epic shipped official DNA file editing, back when there was no sanctioned way to do this at all.

How it works

The new head must share the same UV layout and topology as the original MetaHuman head (a wrap in something like Wrap3D gets you there). Point the UI at the original head and the wrapped head, paste the rig's rl4Embedded node name from the channel box, and run — the script aligns the skeleton's bones to the new surface. From there it's standard Maya work: bind the new head to DHIhead:spine_04 and copy skin weights from the original.

The operation creates new nodes in the rig-logic network and is not undoable, so save a copy of the scene first.

Status

Deprecated, fondly. UE 5.6 added official DNA editing in Maya (see Epic's expression editor docs), which makes this approach obsolete — the script remains compatible up to UE 5.4 MetaHumans and won't be updated past that. It was my first real coding project, recently updated by cemccabe77 from the community, and is MIT licensed.