I have a number of alembic groom hairs for my character creator project, all of which work perfectly in the editor. Physics are enabled, it reacts to collision bodies, etc. However, when I package the game, the hair starts to behave strangely. It seems the physics no longer work, and the binding asset does not keep the hair attached to the head (hair simply stays in place when the character moves their head).
Any idea what could be going on here? I’ve packaged groom hair successfully before, so not sure why this is happening now. All I could find were a number of unanswered threads with similar issues.
It turns out that the player must be loaded into the persistent level in order for grooms to function correctly. Having the default pawn class set to the player character is not sufficient. Spawning in your character on begin play won’t work either.
Instead of having the player as the default pawn, I set it to “None”, put the player into the level then possessed it on begin play. After that I was able to package and the grooms worked correctly.
EDIT: In addition to the above, the groom hair with physics must also be attached to your character in the persistent level when the game is packaged. Attaching the hair to your character on begin play won’t work, the hair must be in the level.