Are MetaHuman grooms and shaders expected to remain closed? Specifically, we’d like to modify the hair card shader, we’d like to see if that can be completely separated from the groom shader.
Hi there,
Are you referring to customizing the hair in the Metahuman Creator interface, using a custom shader? Or after you bring the Metahuman / Groom into Unreal as regular assets? Unfortunately I’m not able to comment on features that aren’t already on the public roadmap, so I can’t really comment on whether something like this will be coming to Metahuman Creator any time soon.
The Groom assets in Unreal already utilise a modular material setup if that’s what you’re asking. Each type of groom geometry (Strands, Cards, Meshes) can be assigned their own material slot, per group, per LOD (Note: you need to ensure that the group index and LOD index match what is set up in the LOD tab, in terms of the geometry set up to run on a specific LOD / group). You can also swap out the hair cards and helmet meshes here (if you wanted to customize these more, I’d suggest using the Maya / Houdini plugins for Metahuman for customization before importing the finalized models / grooms into unreal).
[Image Removed]Each material slot can be assigned a different material in the material tab.
[Image Removed]Usually you would use the new Hair Shading Model for these materials and utilise the Hair Attributes node (whose inputs are driven from the groom asset). But you can also change this to use a basic Default Lit shader if you want. The material is fully customizable, just like any other unreal material.
[Image Removed][Image Removed]Groom asset textures for hair attributes
[Image Removed]
Hopefully this answers your question
Regards,
Lance Chaney