Greetings! I have been stuck with an issue for too long and I’d like to reach out to any groom virtuosos that may have more insight on how unreal handles alembic groom assets and how to troubleshoot issues with them.
Working from Blender 4.5.3 I have been able to export and import Alembic groom assets containing particle hair modifiers using the following export and import settings. I have tested this on Unreal engine 5.2.1 and 5.5.4
The first issue that I have encountered some good folks on here have already discussed with varying success and that regards the scale of the alembic exports. I have seen that the scale of the alembic files is always set to 100 for export on the tutorials I have found and as the default export setting this popular groom exporting addon by @turbocheke.
So I believe that setting must be correct however when I import an alembic groom file at that scale (or any scale other than 1 from my testing) the engine would crash with a paging file too small error.
This led me to increasing my paging file size to 50000mb (space available is 78770mb) and changing some setting in my baseeditor.ini, Specifically lowering the value of my MemoryMinFreeVirtual, MemoryMinFreePhysical values to 256 following advice on this thread to troubleshoot this.
Paging file being too small for operation, yet the page file is large enough
After this my editor would still hang seemingly indefinitely so I dug up some console variables that were mentioned as being potential fixes for this but still had the same hanging results.
Editor.AsyncSkinnedAssetCompilation 2
Interchange.FeatureFlags.Import.FBX false
Waiting for skinned assets to be ready in Groom binding never ends
After this I decided to just try working with the rig and groom assets imported at a scale of 1 which does successfully import and creates a binding asset however on fur covered meshes that deform like an animal leg I am having issues now with some strands of the hair being bound to the wrong vertices on the mesh (only in Unreal not Blender). Is this likely a separate issue with the chosen guides/ interpolation or is that one of the issues we avoid if I successfully imported with the giant scale?
Any insights or other troubleshooting paths would be greatly appreciated, thanks for taking the time to read this.