UE5 groom is borked…Here’s an example of my Tallman character from my Phantasm project to
where the groom hair works great in UE4 4.26, yet in UE5 the groom hair goes all haywire when motion is applied
as my character is moving or turning. The hair goes all over the place and distorts like in the codex from
xcom2. another thing is trying to load a level to work on it takes fifty thousand million years to load.
what gives? not impressed so far, as also when I apply nanite to static meshes the model gets all mangled.
I really want to like UE5 but so far just disapointment. I know when something doesn’t work and this clearly
is just hype on a broken product. Perhaps in the future these things will get fixed but out of the box, I’m not happy.
My apolgies if I’m not expressing my thoughts on this clearly, when things work as they should all is well, when it doesn’t
it’s nothing more than wasted time and work done in frustration.
Any suggestions to level load times and borked groom is welcomed. else I may just stick with UE4 4.26 if this continues, Thanks.
Disapointed in UE5, sorry. Overtired and frustrated…
Here’s another example between the two editors same assets with a different groom asset, same result on UE5 as the hair goes all over the place. something clearly isn’t working in UE5 for groom hair. and this time the character is standing still idle.
Update: for most of it after much experimentation I have been able to fix most of it to a certain degree.
as there are differences in UE4 to UE5. One aspect was re-importing the groom as originally it was migrated and
I had to reset all of it and setup new parameters. one thing I found was the groom now needs a physics asset assigned to it
all adjusted accordingly as well to fit with the groom hair, as UE4 it was not required for some reason.
and it’s properties need to be set to rigid instead of the default binding type skinning. before having it’s physics properties
set enabled with the groom springs nigara asset. This works well for shorter hair but with longer hair it has become
still a bit frustrating getting it all to work as it should and as it did in UE4. I still get some strands sticking out
in spots but I have stopped it from flying all over the place like it was doing before. In my opinion let’s first look
at how UE4 went through 26-27 updates to become what and where it is today. UE5 hopefully wont need that many updates
before it gets to be a more superior platform to it’s predecessor UE4. and with community help and github among other contributions
I look forward to utilizing this newer tech yet in the meantime however In my opinion It still needs more refinement and work before
it can really shine as it was meant to. Also I have UE5 updated to 5.0.1. So perhaps the best is yet to come? I hope so
because really I’ve been appreciating UE4 quite a bit lately and only hope for the best in UE5.
Groom got a new collision size variable in 5.0 and it defaults to huge numbers, causing hair explosion. Simply changing it back to something like 1 got them to work as intended for me.
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I like that description as that accurately tells the state it was in ( Hair Explosion) 
I couldn’t find the size you were referring to but what I did find was unchecking solve collision under collision restraints seemed to help quite a bit as that took the static appearance out of it.
Talk about a bad hair day…at least your suggestion pointed me in the right direction to look into and messing with those two check boxes (Project Collision and or Solve Collision) made a difference to the big poof. I’m not entirely sure I can call this matter resolved yet as more testing may need to be done. I’ll update accordingly , Cheers! J
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It’s under Collision Constraints, called Collision Radius or something iirc. When I first migrated every single asset had it set to 10, I had to edit every one.
I did try and change all the numbers and it still had no effect ,so then by unchecking the solve collision box was I able to relax the frizz explosion. as well I tried a combination of both off and it helped but with both checked that did cause the anomaly. apparently there is conflict between the two.
Also addressing the other subject I mentioned of long load times , every time I load a level to edit it still has to prepare shaders and the opening editor dialog still takes forever to load where in ue4 it’s almost instant.
Nope, GROOM IS STILL BORKED!!! After fixing up my project more in UE4 I thought I try and re-integrate or reload the whole project into UE5 as a new copy. guess what, it’s still a disaster even with the changes I tried it still is F******ed. Unusable and pointless. Huge disappointment. and every time I load a level again to work on it takes FOREVER to load. Perhaps in UE5 5.26 I’ll maybe try again , I am so put off by this.
Just wanted to chime in and say that this fixed it for me. My mesh had an improper Physics asset (read: none) due to a scaling issue from Blender → UE4, causing the hair to explode outward while rotating, resulting in an engine crash. The hair asset I’m using isn’t any longer than shoulder length, though.
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In UE4 it works fine it’s in UE 5 that the problem persists. Glad to hear I’m not the only one this is happening to. yet hair explosion while rotating describes the situation perfectly.
Thank you, that did it for me. I did that and also adjusted the physics asset of my character.
Changing collision radius did the trick for me.
Thanks !
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Hey, I’m having the exact same issue! Did you fix it by just assigning a physics asset? Reimporting the hair at a different scale? I assigned a physics asset and it’s still broooken.
Did you manage to fix it ?
I fixed it by reimporting the hair grooms… also I LOVE PHANTASM “BOOOY!!” lol