NEW Dynamic Hair Tutorial - Blender to Unreal Engine 4 Groom UE4.26

Hey I just made a new Blender to UE4 Groom tutorial with improved workflow

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Thanks for the workflow video! It works as is but I have an issue that does not pertain to this video specifically, sadly I’ve found no solution elsewhere after 18+ hours of searching.

Issue #1: When I go to open the groom asset standalone editor, I do not have the same editor you do, I have a basic list of 1 grooming group and it’s mostly greyed out, that’s about it.

Issue #2: The hair I am using is going absolutely insane. The length is way past the groom setup I made, somewhere around 27k units too long, and to top it off it looks like most of the hair is circling back to the mesh root local transform 0,0,0 or something very weird. There is also a lot of lag in the editor when close to the model/groom system.

issue #3: I can not change the hair length param.

backstory:
I am using curves exported as an OBJ and brought into Blender then exported as an Alembic format. The curves come from ZBrush Fibermesh in the order of hundreds of thousands.

I have tried many solutions but nothing is really conclusive.

Only Particle Hair exported from Blender as alembic will work properly.

Thank you for the information, I’ll be looking into why that is the case and if it’s possible to use curves. Otherwise I will be converting millions of curves to particle hair somehow.

Thanks for your workflow tutorial ! and I’ve engadge a new problem, my character with morphtargets facial animation, but I don’t know how to drive beard groom when character open mouth by morphtargets, in maya groom base could warp the blendshape, but I don’t know if UE got the same proposed, or I could only binding the groom in a rigging skeletal mesh. But I want to make a ARface character, iphone just work on morphtargets.

Groom usualy works out of the box with blendshapes…when you use a binding asset

What about setting up the groom material? When I try to generate the textures (folicle etc) they are just black from Blender, not showing the strands coloured, like in docs.
If I do the basic setup it’s too shiny and looks bad. Need PDO and other things mapped I guess. I’m no material tech artist.
I just want to figure out why I don’t even get these textures baked to move further.

To clarify I am currently using a material with const4 basecolor, const spec etc setup.

Also really interested to see examples with cards and stuff. Get some production metrics, Is it better to use cards for a lot of detail? How well does it LOD? What’s a good strand budget per character?
I’m already importing GroomAssetComponent at source level… How attached should I get? :cool:

I think what is needed is writing the groom_root_uv attribute to the file using the hair particle material properties. I’ll look into it myself when I get a chance.
I think it should be possible to replicate what the Maya scripts are doing.I think I saw the mel scripts in docs somewhere.

Well it would be realy nice if one could make this with python scripts in blender

Hey Marvel Master… Thanks for the tut… I went through it and although it added the orange colour when I implimented your node system from a flat gery colour, I still can’t manage to line up the texture cooordinates for the groom. Any ideas where I’m going wrong?




ue5 seems to work differently, havent looked into that topic on ue5 how or if its possible.

Has anyone got this working in Unreal as of yet ?

I rather not shell out $$$ to use Maya and Xgen

So how do we color a bear, tiger, lion etc in Blender so that it also works in Unreal ?

My fur looks great in blender, it is using the vertex color found at the base to color the entire strand, so my UV texture map works fine, but not in unreal ?

Right now this post addresses the situation quite well Adding uv data to alembic on export - #2 by flowb - Other Development Topics - Blender Developer Talk