Hi @TechLord,
I’m glad you like the hair rendering. =)
The UE4 version I’m using is the one integrated by Nvidia (a GitHub account is required to view the page, or it might show 404 if you haven’t logged in already). I followed the tutorials posted on Nvidia’s official website to learn how the export pipeline works from third-party software (Maya or 3dsMax) to UE4.
The tutorials are quite comprehensive and straight forward, watching one of them and you should know all the necessary steps to bring your grooming results to UE4.
After exporting to UE4 and assign Hairworks asset to Hairworks component, the rest of the works involves a lot of tweaking and adjusting back and forth between third-party software and UE4 to achieve the looks and style you are aiming for - which is not very difficult but time-consuming and tedious - since, for every adjustment, you can’t visualize the final result right away in UE4.
That being said, while I have no experience with the latest version of UE,** instead of using the Nvidia’s GitHub branch, I will recommend trying out the hair grooming systems introduced since UE4.24, which is a fully integrated solution that allow developers to perform the grooming process in-engine and visualize the final results accordingly.**
Although from what I see in the tutorial video so far, the current UE4’s hair grooming system lacks a lot of artistic controls compare to the Nvidia’s branch, I believe the new hair grooming system is the officially supported one and Epic will probably improve the system in the future in terms of ease of use, hair simulation, and artistic controls.
I hope this information could help you decide which route to take and get started with hair grooming.
Have a wonderful weekend! :3
P.S. If you decided to use Nvidia’s branch, here is a short article I wrote about the tips and tricks I’ve learned using Nvidia’s Hairworks tools.