News
October 27, 2026
Mutable Sample for runtime character customization—now updated for UE 5.8!
The Mutable real-time character customization toolset is now Production-Ready in Unreal Engine 5.8—and to celebrate, the Mutable Sample is back with its biggest update yet.
Designed to showcase customization systems for games, the sample offers a hands-on way to learn how Mutable combines and transforms meshes, materials, and textures at runtime—transforming a wardrobe of individual parts into a unique character, vehicle, or object. Open the Customizable Objects included in the sample, explore how they work, and use them as starting points for your own project.
Let’s take a look at what’s new in this release.
Designed to showcase customization systems for games, the sample offers a hands-on way to learn how Mutable combines and transforms meshes, materials, and textures at runtime—transforming a wardrobe of individual parts into a unique character, vehicle, or object. Open the Customizable Objects included in the sample, explore how they work, and use them as starting points for your own project.
Let’s take a look at what’s new in this release.
Customizable MetaHumans
This updated sample answers one of the questions we hear most from the community: how to set up a scalable Customizable Object for MetaHumans. It includes a complete example that you can use as the foundation for your own MetaHuman character.Built using the Ada MetaHuman preset and Epic’s MetaHuman assets from Fab, the entire character—including the body, face, grooms, and MetaHuman Cloth—is assembled in the MetaHuman plugin, then driven through Mutable as a dataless Customizable Object. Swap outfits or change hairstyles, and Mutable composes the selected elements into a fully assembled, runtime-ready character.
The MetaHuman character in the Showcase level is ready to customize and expand. You can add new wardrobe items to its available accessories list and explore how the dataless workflow brings in new assets without requiring you to modify the Customizable Object itself.
Simplified workflow for Skeletal Meshes
Manipulating Skeletal Meshes has never been easier with Mutable. This new Mutable update brings users the option to work at the Skeletal Mesh level without worrying about LODs, Materials, and Mesh sections.Work with much simpler graphs and avoid having to connect each and every LODs and Mesh sections. Just grab a Pin from the SKM Node and Mutable will do the magic under the hood to make everything work.
Body shape morphs and cloth refitting
A customizable character isn’t much use if the clothes don’t follow the body. This release pairs body shape morphs with automatic cloth refitting, so you can drive a character from slim to heavy on a single slider and watch every garment come along for the ride.Under the hood, Mutable reshapes garment meshes to match the deformed body at composition time. Tanktops, shirts, and pants now share a common reshaping setup, so upper and lower garments deform together instead of fighting each other at the waistline. Combined with Remove Unseen, which strips the geometry hidden underneath clothing, you get clean silhouettes across the full morph range—no clipping, no wasted triangles.
A showcase level showing every Mutable feature
Rather than burying each technique inside one complex character, we’ve built a dedicated Showcase level where every major Mutable capability gets its own Customizable Object, isolated and ready to inspect.Start with the Basic CO for a minimal working setup, then work through Color Patterns and Skin Tone for parametric material variation, Projectors for decal-based customization like tattoos and logos, and Edit Material for patching materials through Mutable nodes.
In the customizable weapon example, Data Tables show how to drive customization options straight from a Data Table node, while Macros demonstrate reusable graph logic you can share across objects. And for the performance side, Material Merging illustrates how Mutable collapses materials across combined meshes to cut draw calls.
Each one is small, self-contained, and documented—pick the feature you need and copy the pattern.
Enhancements
The main character’s Customizable Object has been revisited to reflect some of the current best practices.Finally, the accompanying How-To tutorials and Mutable Documentation have been refreshed for 5.8, with a brand-new Basic CO walkthrough joining existing guides for Components, Mesh Based Cloth, Patches, Remove Unseen, Shape Variations, Skin Tone, Color Patterns, and the Table Node.
We hope you enjoy these updates to the Mutable Sample. Download it today and start building characters your players can truly customize in real time.