Character Customizer — First Look + Troubleshooting LOD & Multiplayer Sync Issues

Intro Recently, I purchased the Character Customizer asset on the UE Marketplace FAB — a very promising and flexible tool for building customizable, network-ready characters. While I haven’t had the chance to fully integrate and test it inside my project, I came across an interesting support conversation on the official Discord.

A user named IcyButSpicy ran into an issue that caught my attention, and the asset creator jordbugg inc did his best to help. I was inspired by the discussion and decided to put together this small first-look review combined with a possible solution to the problem. Hopefully, it helps others facing the same thing. Once I test it myself — I’ll update this post with results!

📦 Quick Summary: What is Character Customizer?

Character Customizer is a networked character generation system that supports:

• Fully customizable male and female characters

• 16 hairstyles, 4 beards, and 44 tintable clothing items

• Compatible with MetaHumans (same skeleton, proportions)

• Crowd spawning and optimization (large-scale NPC support)

• Facial animation morphs (ARKit), viseme lipsync (OVR standard)

• Random NPC generation, idle animations, sitting, hit reacts

Ideal for PC development and fully rigged with LOD support.

❗ The Issue: LOD Not Syncing Between Components

User IcyButSpicy noticed that hair and clothing meshes switch LOD levels at different times than the main character body.

Root Cause: Unreal’s Sync Attach Parent LOD feature doesn’t always properly synchronize LODs across attached skeletal mesh components — especially in runtime-spawned setups like this one.

Dev Response: jordbugg explained the likely issue, but some users may find the answer hard to follow.

🛠️ POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Disable Sync Attach Parent LOD

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of what might fix it:

1. Open the Construction Script of your base character class

2. Loop through all attached components (Hair, Hats, Beards, etc)

3. For each, set:

   Set Sync Attach Parent LOD → false

4. Apply this ONLY to created SkeletalMeshComponents, not the parent mesh⛔

This should stop the mismatch between character body and cosmetic attachments.

🧠 Bonus: Tips for Multiplayer Integration

Some CrowdSpawner features require extra attention in multiplayer setups:

• Avoid default spawner in network play — use a custom Multicast spawn logic

• Mark important variables like CC_Loaded_Variables as RepNotify

• Random hair logic might always choose the last entry in DataTable — double check your randomization logic

• Custom textures (skin/face) work fine — just make sure UV and MI structure is respected

🧵 Conclusion

This post is not a deep dive yet — just a quick troubleshooting guide based on Discord insights and initial exploration. Big thanks to jordbugg inc for building such a solid foundation. I’ll return later with confirmed test results once the system is fully wired up in my sandbox project.

If this helps anyone, let me know — and if you already solved this differently, drop your ideas below!