groom lighting, issue with halo'ing, not really sure what to all it

My groom is creating this strange halo’ing effect under the hair. Its easiest to see from mid-distance. Ive tried all the light settings, all the post process settings, and anything else I can think of. Happens with Lumen, RT, etc. GI on/off, light/heavy etc. doesnt affect it, nor does the type or number of lights.

With the hair width turned down to .0001, its still visible, point being that the thinner I attempt to make the hair, like fine hair, the more noticeable it is.




Welcome to the total sstorm that’s been grooms since release.

It may be something simple like a distance to nearest surface node or something similar in the material which is attempting to simulate (very badly as per epic’s usual) light near the root.

Go with hair cards, You’ll never have said problem - though for a bundle like you have the flow map is a bit of a pita.
Rather than hair cards you may want to do hair-card-cylinders…

Oh, bonus:
It could also just be the light you have in the scene. Point VS direction VS the Area Light, vs the spot light too.

Thank you. Unfortunately it’s not light type, tried all of them.

And yeah I could do hair cards but strand hair is the future and better looking, id rather struggle with it than go back.

I’ll look through the hair material and see if there is anything like that in there.

Yea well… hair strands aren’t the future the way epic has done it. If you were using anything else, maybe. Even then it does depend on application.

Regardless of that too, hair cards will always look better when done properly, and cost a lot less.
While naturally requiring more time to create/edit/process etc.

Also, before you (not you per se, anyone really) says that grooms work fine, try having 20 or so in the same scene. Talk to anyone about epic’s groom after that :stuck_out_tongue:

Re the material.
I think they moved to a straight up dedicated USF for it, so it could be you have to actually edit an engine file to get it to work.
Normally that isnt a suggest course of action, since validating engine files will overwrite your local changes. So make sure you (or anyone else) dont fall in that pitfall.
Create your own usf/move the code to it/modify it/assign it… unfortunately, it does take a bit to set up…

Re the issue you have on the groom itself.
Check if the light settings for the light have the option to affect coloring via transparency and similar.
It could be a situation where the light thinks it needs to be brighter because it is passing through the hair strands - or something similarly silly.

I’m sure Epic will get it ironed out eventually.

Cant agree with you though about strand vs. alpha hair though, strand looks quite a lot better and iteration is so much faster.

Even if I could match the quality with alpha cards, I would be making changes at about 1/10th the speed. By the time I’ve worked through a single iteration with alpha hair, id be on my 10th with the strand hair - more time on art over technical modeling means a vastly better art product.

And if I get even halfway in with alpha hair and have to change some of the alpha cards, forget it. Once alpha card hair is made its almost impossible to edit without becoming a mess.

Just my experience anyways.

It’s partly true. They are painful to make. But the end result works for anything/with anything, compared to the strands which since their introduction 2 years ago or more still don’t work with everything - not even unreal.

In blender for one, you shpuld be able to get a strand hair setup converted to cards relatively fast.

However results look a lot better when you bake down a hair sheet first, then make the haircards, then use the hair system in blender to add and style haircards.

Modification of an asset made in such a way also becomes trivial. You can manage the cards like you would a single hair strand.

I have never tried this in maya, or 3dmax, or even zbrush since thats nowhere near my primary use for it (sculpt micro details or polypaint). But im fairly certain they too offer some sort of similar system where items you create can be instanced and changed on a spline, then later baked down into actual objects based on those transofrms.

For something similar to the hairdo you are showing, dev time would probably be less than 4 hours… well, witout a flowmap anyway.