Custom NPC hair/fur/feathers best practice?

Development Asset Creation
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Hi Hivemind.

I’m looking into creating a pipeline for my custom NPC characters in Fortnite using UEFN for creating hair, feathers and fur.

I have been looking for some documentation or best practices for this in order not to make it to heavy/complex.

Is it possible to use dynamic/simulated/physics hair in UEFN?

Have anyone tried to use hair cards or similar groom asssts in UEFN? aim wondering if the standard workflow from UE5 can be transferred over to UEFN?

Is there an official breakdown on how Epic created hair for characters in Fortnite?.

Maybe someone has done this or seen how to work with hair in UEFN? Any link or ideas is appreciated!!

All the best!

Mikael

3

Hello Mikael and the rest of the hivemind.

As of right now, I could not find any official Fortnite Hair breakdown.

I did meet with some Metahuman team members about Groom assets in UEFN and some of the differences between Metahuman in UEFN vs UE5.

As of v35.00, the workflow for UEFN Groom assets creation is the same as for UE5. One can also import MetaHuman assets directly from Bridge in UEFN.

As for performance and LODs, there are some differences between UE5 and UEFN.

  • UE5 metahuman has eight levels of LODs, configurable from LOD0 to LOD7.
  • UEFN has four levels of LODs. This difference is to reduce memory overhead.

There are three levels of quality when importing Metahuman.

  1. High, with UE corresponding LODs : 1,3,5,7
  2. Medium, with UE corresponding LODs : 3,5,7
  3. Low, with UE corresponding LODs : 5,7

Here are some UE5 guides on creating Groom assets that apply to UEFN too.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/groom-asset-editor-user-guide-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.4

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/setting-up-cards-and-meshes-for-grooms-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.4

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/generating-groom-textures-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.4

When creating your own hair assets, here are some guidelines based on what Metahuman is importing into UEFN from UE5.
UFEN LOD0. Hair strands are around 25k curves, and hair cards are around 15k tris. Both stands and card meshes are supported.
UEFN LOD 1: Mesh is hair cards, around 3- 5k tris. Stands disabled
UEFN LOD 2: Mesh is a volume aka “helmet,” rather than cards. Mesh and Textures can be generated in UE5 from strands using the Hair Modeling Toolset and Textures or other DCC software. Mesh is around 500 tris
UEFN LOD 3: Volume Mesh, around 150 tris.

Hope this helps.
Zim

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