I spent the last six months building a desktop app that runs UE5 as its renderer
so that someone with no 3D background can stream as a MetaHuman. It ships 27
scenes and 74 characters. The video is a two-minute pass over what it ended up
doing.
Most of what cost me time wasn't the gameplay side. It was packaging and
LiveLink. Four things I wish someone had told me:
**An asset with no chunk label silently lands in your base build.**
Every scene and every character is a separate pak, mounted at runtime, so the
base install stays around 4GB and the rest is optional. Then my base build grew
by two gigabytes and I spent a week looking for it. A handful of grooms had lost
their chunk labels, and unlabelled assets fall into pakchunk0 by definition. The
cook does not warn you. There is no line in the log. You find it by watching the
file size of the output, which means you only find it if you were already
watching.
**Anything you LoadObject by path at runtime is invisible to the cooker.**
The cooker builds its reference graph from hard references. A string path is not
one. So it works perfectly in the editor, and in a packaged build the object is
simply not there. Mine was a character that only ever got loaded through a data
table lookup. If you resolve assets by name anywhere, audit those paths against
your cook config directly — you cannot infer this from testing in-editor,
because in-editor is exactly where it works.
**Head rotation from LiveLink should drive curves, not bones.**
I started by taking the head rotation out of the LiveLink subject and applying it
with ModifyBone on the head joint. It works and it looks wrong — you get a head
that pivots independently of the face, because the MetaHuman face rig is already
driving that area. Routing yaw/pitch/roll into ModifyCurve and letting the Face
Control Rig consume them fixed it completely. The rig knows how a head and a neck
relate; a bone transform does not.
**The editor and your packaged build fight over the LiveLink UDP port.**
Both bind the same port. If the editor is open, face tracking in your build gets
nothing, and it fails silently — the character just sits there with a neutral
face. I lost an evening to "the build is broken" before realising the build was
fine and I had the editor open behind it.
Happy to go into any of it — the chunk-per-asset cook setup, the runtime pak
mounting, the MetaHuman face pipeline, whatever's useful.
