CC5: Remove Breast Bones While Preserving Digital Human Shader

Hello, I am using a CC3+ / CC5 HD character for Unreal Engine 5.

I need to remove only the Breast bones from the character skeleton because they are not used in our project. In CC5, I tried:

Optimize and Decimate → Custom → Skeleton → uncheck Breast → Convert

This successfully removes the Breast bones, but it also converts the character from Digital Human Shader / multi-materials to PBR.

Is there an official CC5 workflow to remove only the Breast bones while preserving the original CC3+ / CC5 HD character, Digital Human Skin shader, SkinGen data, material slots, and Unreal Auto Setup compatibility?

If this is not supported in CC5, is the recommended approach to keep the bones for LOD 0 and remove them only through Unreal Engine LOD bone reduction, or to modify the exported FBX in Blender/Maya and transfer the weights to the parent spine bone?

Thank you.

Hi evilbition,

Running Optimize and Decimate converts the shader to standard PBR (see Image 1).

To avoid this, please use the standard CC5 export process and delete the breast bone only after you’ve imported the Digital Human Shader into Unreal Engine (shown below).

Feel free to let us know if you have any further questions.

Regards