How to Make Custom Hair for UNREAL ENGINE 5

[@Ignash]

Just came to say that you're absolutely right that every 3D software should use the same coordinate system and I am ready to die on this hill with you.

[@artofjhill]

[@JhebadiaSprunklefunk]

Just FYI if you intend to bind the hair and do animation, you cannot do transforms on the component (for the rotation & mirroring) as that will break the animation, you need to do any of that either as part of the import or completely pre-import. More important for hair over deforming mesh areas, like beards and animals tho, just donking hair on a headtop is probs fine.

[@TomThompson]

Exactly. There is an option to apply a transform during the import and it's exposed on the import GUI. Just put those exact same values there and then when it is imported you can zero anything on the component out. You're golden.

[@binyaminbass]

There is no only to alter the location at import, only the scale and rotation. However, whenever I bind the groom, it is offset a little from the mesh, either above or in front. This only happens in UE5 but not in UE 4.27. Is this a bug? Anyone else get this?

[@ericduque5407]

Awesome info! I have been avoiding a few personal project ideas because hand placing hair cards is so tedious and time intensive to get high quality results, but this looks more fun and way more powerful!

[@artofjhill]

Glad you like it. Get after those projects!

[@vM_VIC]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You, Sir, are an ocean of knowledge and a river of inspiration. In two videos you have given me high impact solutions to problems I have been struggling with for three years. I am ready to pick up a project I had dropped a year ago… and complete it as I had originally envisioned. Thank you.

[@artofjhill]

Happy to hear that. Finish that project!

[@antonillustration7918]

I cant believe I get to watch the videos you make for free. I think you make some of if not the most high production value intermediate to advanced CG tutourials on youtube man. All I can say is thank you, keep doing what you're doing. edit: Just realized you have a Patreon, instant subscribe to the member tier from here!

[@artofjhill]

Thank you 🙏

[@MAJmufin]

Bruh. im not even a character artist but this has me watching all the way through. Very informative on UE5 in general for me.

[@denster7715]

This video kickstarted some experimentation that has led me to successfully import a self-made animated rig with hair and fur that reacts to both gravity and air resistance. Great stuff as always!

[@artofjhill]

Awesome! Love to hear it

[@TobiH-3D]

Hey there! Here are few ideas to streamline your workflow: 1. You can hold "1" and click for a "const" [[Just like holding "3" and clicking for a vector 3 (which can be used for color)]] 2. You can hold "s" and click for a "parameter" [[so that you don't need to convert you "const" manually every time]] 3. Hold "m" and click for a "multiply" 4. Hold "L" and click for a "LERP" Just in case you didn't knew it already. I loved that part with the Hair material by the way. Thank you for sharing!

[@artofjhill]

The pro tips. Thank you. Glad you liked it

[@fuzzypancake123]

Awesome video!! But I think the noise you make at the end can be improved a bit. It behaves a bit weird because you are interpolating from 0 to noise. Instead I propose you change the lerp A input to 1, and then also multiply the noise with 2. This will make it so that at 0 noisiness you will get the color you input only. And at 1 noisiness the color will go from black to 2 times the color. And if you input like 0.1 you get 90% color and 10% noise. This makes it a lot more intuitive. Hopes it helps someone :)

[@artofjhill]

Great idea thank you!

[@innerguardianXIII]

Can you do a version that doesn't use Maya? Some people can't afford that and have to rely on Blender.

[@wanderinglord8164]

You can do the same thing using Ornatrix but it's on 3DS max or Autodesk softwares. :/ Otherwise you can use Maya as a student.

[@Santanazation]

You can have the same results with Blender

[@artofjhill]

I don’t know how to make hair in Blender and I don’t believe you can get the same results

[@suzukito]

@@artofjhillthats incorrect

[@WolfGuy1]

​@@artofjhill what? Dude??

[@SideViewMirrorProd]

as always, another great tutorial. I'll be using this material on the grooms in my current animation project!

[@artofjhill]

Sweet, good luck with your project!

[@vedanttiwari6287]

Some hair cards workflow too please 🥺

[@SolarTara]

Can you make a tutorial on how Arcane did their hair? I know you are more in the realism but as far as I know they blended real hair sim and gen, with hand painting? Not sure but if ya know, that would be rad!

[@PeteGavrov]

You a beast! Thank you so much J, been anticipating this video for a long while 💯

[@artofjhill]

Glad to hear it. I hope you like the video

[@TheIcemanModdeler]

I used this method over a year ago to create hair for my Hercules character, i had to watch a bunch of tutorials to understand the full process of going from Xgen to Unreal, a few extra things to add, if you want to use a texture to color the hair like for the scalp of a character or for an animal then you need to use a special exporter created by Epic that exports RootUV's, normally it only export the hair uv's instead of the uv's from the scalp. There are also other things that can be done like adding lods, hair is optimizable in UE unlike haircards so you can decrease the amount of instances or guides used in animation, on my character i made a custom gravity field in order to create wind. I remember i couldn't add a tube like effect to the hairs like how Xgen has it build in, i could get the u that goes along the hair but not the v, i remember fixing issues with short hairs looking crooked by lowering the nr of points as Xgen would import all hairs with the same number.

[@yeahgirl11]

Thanks for sharing your tips!

[@TheIcemanModdeler]

@@yeahgirl11 Happy to help.

[@shamelhaydar5662]

Can you explain more about this issue? I mean having the colors of the hairs driven by a color texture, I have this lion-like creature that I am working on, I need the hairs to take the color of the color of the color texture beneath them, thanks in advance :)

[@TheIcemanModdeler]

@@shamelhaydar5662 Yes you need a special exporter, there are several but the best one is the one made by Epic that uses Alembic. I learned everything from this video bellow, it's in russian so u need to turn on subtitles, there are 3 or 4 scripts, each has their downsides, i tested each of them but the one made by Epic is the best, it also allows u to combine hair systems into one for Unreal. I recently made another character with hair and encountered the issue that these scripts haven't been updated for Maya 2022 so for my needs i didn't need the RootUV's so i just converted my Xgen Core hair systems to IGS and exported them as alembic from the cache menu. kzbin.info/www/bejne/f6G2h5WPq8qHh6M

[@shamelhaydar5662]

If you have a link to a documentation or an article, truly appertiated,

[@paolopallucchi8054]

Thank you! Can u make a video of an ideal workflow for make a good hair with cards?

[@Djonsing]

9:14 When I turn on this checkbox, the program freezes a lot and starts to slow down wildly, and the video card seems to be not weak: MSI RTX 2060 Super (MS-V375)

[@caseycbenn]

Y is up. I don't argue. Basic deduction of why Y should always be up? Because if you have 3 co-ordinates you must first determine the two dimensional axis first. X is your left to right axis. Like the way we read. Next letter in line would be the Y up defining the other dimension in 2d space. Now you have your flat orthograph. Finally in proper alpha order you would then add the third dimension which is z which is the depth from the 2d perspective. The order is correct. When Z is up it basically implies that 2d is always from the top looking down. I suppose that its why Archviz was dominantly in 3dsmax ... since Archviz visualizes top down. Where as character animation was mostly in Maya which is usual profile view for poses.

[@philmehrart]

25:40 this is pretty much my expression every time I see an awesome new vid from you, this vid is no exception

[@mahin2416]

I am genuinely respect you dear JHill. I have learned a lot from your outstanding knowledge here

[@artofjhill]

Happy to hear that and glad I could help in some way

[@리키파파]

Hi. I'm always rooting for you. Is there a video that applies the face texture to Unreal Engine?

[@artofjhill]

No but I can probably make one

[@리키파파]

@@artofjhill Thank you very much. I'm getting a lot of help. You're an artist ahead of time. 💯

[@edgarkhachatryan5664]

22:11 Thanks for a very informative tutorial. You described everything very clear. The only thing which I would like to ask you clarify is at 22:11 you connect u and seed nodes. What is the reason for that? I know that when the value is added to the u coordinate it is shifting. But what value the seed adds? There is no explanation of it in ue documentation. Maybe you can answer. Thanks

"This is my youtube channel... and this is the law" LMFAO YES.

[@artofjhill]

:)

[@art0ni641]

You're the savoir of free learning! Thank you gracious one

[@SurferXGhost1293]

25:26 How did you put the hair material in the sequencer for animate ?

[@artofjhill]

I forget the exact wording now but I promoted a parameter from my material instance into something that could be added to the sequencer and keyframed

[@MattQVSTheWorld]

"Y is up and Z is forward" THANK YOU! It's not called Pixologic Y Brush. This debate was settled years ago.

[@artofjhill]

☝️

[@wanderinglord8164]

I really worked for 2 months to get the same result, well after that I'm far from having such a beautiful result, but as far as the software to use is concerned I was on the right way ! Really an incredible work, congratulations !

[@artofjhill]

Thank you. I hope the video helps!

[@Denby-e4k]

Thank you so much for sharing, J! Please more vids for characters in UE5 :)

[@artofjhill]

I will

[@noelbachinimiliti1760]

Awesome info! I would like to know if the hair imported tounreal will follow the character animation. Thank you so much

[@artofjhill]

Yes! You’d bind it in the character blueprint. It has physics and everything. It’s awesome. Expensive though, it will nuke frame rate and crash GPUs that don’t have enough memory

[@yanelisbarrosart]

I agree with the axis orientation like.. the real human world Thank you for this!

[@flience1204]

J hill i love you man, every time i watch your video i always get inspired and oneday i hope i could me art like ?you are the reason i like 3d art and thank you for the videos

[@artofjhill]

Thank you. Get after it

[@peterneill2947]

Amazing tutorial. Thank you for the hair material download. Do you happen to have any info on making a material for hair cards? So a shader that would include maps like ID, Depth, Normals etc.?

[@mushudamaschin2608]

Hi, hopefully I can help. Just as a heads up, Maya comes with a bunch of artist made hair card maps, I don't remember the exact folder they're in, but I'm sure you can find them with a quick Google search. If those don't suit you, the easiest way would be to draw the hair color map and opacity in Photoshop or 3D Painter, then take it from there in your favourite texturing suite. You can also look up how to bake an ID map in Maya. The harder but also more realistic way, would be to make 3D tufts of hair in 3D, by modeling them using curves, SubDiv modelling, or heck XGen itself, and then baking a Normal Map and Opacity map from that onto a plane. I'm not sure what you mean by Depth map, nor why you would need an ID map, however I hope my answer was able to provide some help.

[@newnengates3764]

J hill. You the best 3D instructor. I hope that i can join your patreon soon. All's the best.

[@artofjhill]

Thank you

[@bridge1444]

What if we want to import stylized beard for instance? How do we conform (skin wrap) the beard to the face of MH?

[@antoniojunior2898]

I watched your tutorial about creating dope cg hair and this one and they both encouraged me to do the unthinkable some time ago: creating cg hair. Thank you so much for that! Now I'm struggling with hair physics in Unreal Engine 4.7 and I would be glad if you make some tutorial about it. Keep the good work. Cheers.

[@artofjhill]

Happy to hear that. Keep it up

[@mrhmakes]

yeah a tut on making this physics ready would be icing on the cake. Right now it looks beautiful.... but without physics? Interested to see how good it can look with physics and animation or whether this approach is only good for stills

[@vladalukard1]

Great video man! I just have 1 question, how can I get the "DLSS Setting mode" in viewport option as you have? Just to be clear, I installed DLSS plugin and enabled that in plug-ins settings...

[@Bokaj01]

When exporting from Cache, I get an error 'no valid xgen node specified'. I'm selecting the description in the Outliner.

[@Romeo615Videos]

i need some advice on my hair dreads on my channel with collision

[@SideViewMirrorProd]

with regards to the A value of the Lerp coming off the Noise branch should that be set to 1?

[@gerardosanchez6045]

Great video bro, have you managed to export groom with uv for example for an animal with specific texture in the fur?? Like a jaguar and the groom in unreal looks like the skin pattern texture??

[@artofjhill]

Thanks. I have but there are limitations. I have a new script to try that hopefully fixes it. When I do get it working and all figured out I’ll probably make a video on it. There is documentation on the process that Epic made too. Problem is Maya is slow with so many curves and their official script has a limit to how many curves it can do rn

[@ganger111]

You are a hero man, thank you so much for this content!

[@artofjhill]

you got it. Hope it helps!

[@memnok9980]

Get your hair did. Thanks for this!

[@fractalife]

Great tutorial sir, may I ask how to use texture for hair, example tiger pattern etc. plugged RGB texture to base color doesnt work. Thanks again

[@VanniBrighellaUS]

so great! lol "do not argue with me on this. this is my youtube channel. this is the law."

[@artofjhill]

👮‍♂️

[@starloose9467]

wow super cool tutorial man ! :) Do you think it's suitable for a full game project ? I mean, these curves must be pretty heavy for the engine right ? No way we can use it in a game with several characters on screen having these alembic hairs xD right ?

[@artofjhill]

The matrix demo uses this hair and it runs on PS5 at a high frame rate

[@starloose9467]

@@artofjhill oh I didn't know it was the same tech ! Yeah I was blown away by this demo ! Still have it on my PS5 xD Thanks for the answser :)

[@cvety-mirageorgieva8395]

i have a question. I'm currently working on a character that has striped hair. the hair itself is black and the stripes are purple how can I achive this look in unreal engine?

[@이태원-j7m]

Thank you! This video is very powerul!!

[@artofjhill]

🦾

[@SoyoCraft]

Thank you . But is unreal groom plugin only support on pc platform? because when i turn the preview render level to android or ios, the hair disappeared.

[@artofjhill]

Yea unfortunately only PC

[@Crush-kc8ss]

I stumbled upon your videos and grateful I did. Very information and easy to follow. Thank you for the videos. At the 24:47 mark where you change the hair color, is this possible to set up in a slider or color wheel in the UI for in game selection?

[@artofjhill]

Glad you like the videos. Yea I’m sure that’s possible I just don’t exactly know how. It would be connecting a material parameter to UI

[@LifeisgoodTRN]

Thank you so much) !!! Your last videos pushed my char modeling to another level more than some paid courses did)

[@artofjhill]

Glad to hear it

[@khayelihlembele6008]

It's crazy how yesterday I was trying to copy the nodes you used in your Flex video because there wasn't a video for doing dye shades 😂 THANKS MAN!!

[@artofjhill]

I gotchu!

[@darkflip]

Aye man i like the beautiful details :)

[@KenedyTorcatt]

Hi man, thanks for this, I wanted to ask you if its possible to have this hair simulated with physics as well inside UE5?

[@artofjhill]

Yea! And it’s easy. You get the physics for free pretty much

[@KenedyTorcatt]

@@artofjhill so I don't need to weight paint for the physics? Will you be doing a tut on that topic for animated characters?

[@Giga3D811]

The classic -90,0,180 haha, gotta love it

[@artofjhill]

Lol

[@eraia]

This is enormously useful (as are all your tutorials), thank you for sharing! I'll second another commenter's request for a hair card tutorial from XGen groom if that's something you're able to do :)

[@artofjhill]

Glad you found it useful! That isn’t really a workflow

[@paparallada]

Please how can apply a virtual texture UDIM for a hair material? =(

[@makitakitukutuku586]

Unreal J is the best J

[@artofjhill]

🦾

[@mohamadm284]

hello i have a question about hair in unreal. after we imported hair to unreal do we have option to use specifice light system for only the hair system?

[@yashshukla9707]

How to high resolution render for hair / groom in sequencer , because I'm trying to do that in flow jerk was there

[@artofjhill]

I use the movie render queue plugin in unreal. Camera is in sequencer then in movie render queue I set the export resolution and anti aliasing

[@princessmyprincess4284]

Need a haircard or clothing tut

[@mohammadhoseinmayahi324]

Can I use this way for a game character in UE5?

[@oxygencube]

Thanks, this was awesome!

[@bykaminokage]

That is an AMAZING tutorial. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge :)

[@artofjhill]

Glad you like it, I hope it helps

[@red4666]

my groom is acting weirdly when i scale my skeletal mesh up to 2x. apparently the scale of my character was wrong during asset creation in maya, but i already did all the grooming with that, and when i scale him up in UE5 (i'm using a binding uasset) the groom hairs just begin acting weirdly, like they're all pointing outward. is there a fix for this?

[@artofjhill]

You might be out of luck. Changing the scale after authoring might just not work. You could try scaling the mesh in Maya and adjusting the groom there then re export

[@jonathantewnes1224]

Thank you thank you thank you. Needed this to help get started on making hair for our game. Man oh man this was a great tutorial. Just gained 2 subs!

[@artofjhill]

🙏

[@ThisIsLacus]

Amazing video!! ( Random Question though ) in the thumbnail of this video, What font did you use to write "Hair"?

[@artofjhill]

I painted it by hand to look like hair like a real try-hard

[@emrekrs]

Thank you, you just earned a new sub.

[@artofjhill]

🙏

[@jmv1]

how do you have the hair change colors in the movie render que?

[@artofjhill]

I made the animations parameters so I could keyframe them in the sequencer

[@zoltantoth_]

Huge thank you for sharing these! really !

[@artofjhill]

Np I hope they help

[@andrasbaliko]

really cool stuff. thx4the vid

[@erdbeerbus]

thank you .. what version of UE did u use? 4.27?

[@artofjhill]

This is Unreal Engine 5

[@aaaalord]

Thanks for tutorial. If we have so many of these model in game does it effect on fps ?

[@artofjhill]

Definitely. The hair curves are taxing. For production, you’d switch them to a card based hair model in the LODs so it’s only full quality close up

[@denissheptura7141]

Wow! Great) Thank you for sharing

[@ghostgamer0001]

Great Video! Quick Question where did you get your chair and whats the name of the chair?

[@artofjhill]

Antonamus or something like that

[@binyaminbass]

Are you able to bind the groom to a mesh successfully in UE5? My groom is offset from the mesh (this doesn’t happen in UE4.27).

[@artofjhill]

yea you can correct for the offset on import or even in the character BP. it's in the BP that you bind the groom to the character

[@zakrzew3d]

Hi J, I have question about export hair from new blender to UE5 ? I make smome grooming and I can't open FBX in UE. Could You help me ?

[@artofjhill]

It would need to be converted to curves in blender then exported as an .abc I don’t know how to do that

[@zakrzew3d]

@@artofjhill ok, thanks. Now I ll create Geisha realtime model.

[@rossdanielart]

Shoot man, was really looking forward to a hair tut on nappy hair.

[@artofjhill]

I’ll do that sometime

[@thegreatSalu]

I just started using Xgen and Hair/Fur in Unreal..This was extremely helpful...but when it comes to say....a Bengal Cat...I create fur for it in Maya..import the hair as groom in Unreal...but the doesn't match the body....due to its patterns on fur...so how do I create fur material in Unreal?

[@Displant]

Amazing tutorials as always

[@artofjhill]

🙏

[@ratanm997]

Awesome stuff

[@LisaFenix]

Hey, thank you so much for this!!

[@artofjhill]

np, I hope it helps

[@iaroslavgrygorash5443]

Good job! Thanks for sharing!

[@artofjhill]

Np I hope it helps

[@caseycbenn]

Though this the manual rotation is a solution for the hair, ultimately, you have to work it out before import so that if you bind the hair for physics/animation, it binds correctly right?

[@artofjhill]

nah you can do it on import and it works fine. it would be super weird to author it that way imo

[@foxie2cool]

Thanks for this one J!! it's spot on, just wanted to know can you use this shader with Alpha card based hair aswell?

[@artofjhill]

hey, thanks. nah you'd need to use a different shading model and alpha opacity for that

[@buffdezines7924]

i have a question! is there a way to export a peach fuzz out of maya and use it in Unreal Engine with animated characters? Like peach fuzz would react to all the facial movements and bends and crevices

[@artofjhill]

Yea. You’d just make peach fuzz and export it the same way. When attached to a BP is moved with the mesh. That’s how MetaHumans does it

[@TheHamt]

amaaaazing, thks so much!

[@Gaientv]

"dont argue with me this is my chanel" haha this crack me up lol

[@sherifrefaat6131]

thanks man very useful vedio i Do have question can i still use unreal5 for charater render ,may be turntable with OD GTX graphic card 3080 TI i dont' have the RTX :D

[@artofjhill]

Yea

[@kartikwarudkar6041]

Is it possible to make texture based material? like using base color as texture for hair

[@artofjhill]

Yes but I don’t know how yet

[@max995pc]

love the tutorial, just what I needed. I come from an unreal background but know little about Maya so this helped. Off topic: anybody know what chair that is?

[@artofjhill]

www.autonomous.ai

[@max995pc]

@@artofjhill Perfect thank you 👌

[@MagicSwordFilms]

Thank you very much! This is super helpful. Do you know if theres a way to wire those U and V coordinates into an image texture? I'm working on a project with a lot of fur and being able to make the maps by hand in substance painter has been helpful and works great in Blender, haven't found a good way to get it into unreal yet.

[@artofjhill]

I know you can just not how yet. There have been furry creatures with patterns made so I know it’s possible

[@FeedingWolves]

This is awesome!

[@artofjhill]

Thanks! Hope to see some cool hair in your future videos :)

[@DarkMount33]

Is there a way to color the hair based on a texture? Or based on the texture of the model it's bound to?

[@artofjhill]

I wish. There kind of is but doesn’t work with a lot of hairs yet. At least I haven’t figured it out

[@DarkMount33]

@@artofjhill That's a bummer. Thanks for the response.

[@Instant_Nerf]

Well how do you do a different hair style. This just shows how to import it ?

[@artofjhill]

You can make any hairstyle with XGen. I have a video and so do others

[@rigomortisfxstudios]

nice but alot of us do not have maya software is there a work around thanks and stay safe !

[@artofjhill]

Maya has XGen and it's great. There are other grooming tools. For UE, you need to export curves as a .abc

[@samph5218]

Hi, thank you for the great tut, but i have one problem i hope you can help with. Once youve used 'convert to interactive groom' once, you can't do it again. If for say you updated the xgen groom and thenyou try and convert again, it comes out with no attached material and if you try and export that one to cache, it crashes maya :( what am i missing? Please help.

[@artofjhill]

It’s been fine in my experience. Each time I update I delete the interactive groom in Maya. Update the original groom then convert to interactive and export cache again. Overwrite the .abc and it updates in engine. I’ve done this often without issue

[@samph5218]

@@artofjhill Thanks, ill try it that way. Appreciate your reply too.

[@nilexh3476]

J, love you man ❤️

[@artofjhill]

❤️

[@Sincerelytk]

I am a complete noob when it comes to this stuff, my question is, is it possible to create this from a photo? Or do you have to build this from scratch?

[@artofjhill]

You have to build it

[@Sincerelytk]

@@artofjhill thanks

[@yuanzhou3010]

Thank you so much for sharing. And I have an issue to consult you.My version is UE5.0.2,I used the same Hair Material as yours,but the Material never shows the right effect,no reflet and highlight there,can you help me with that? Thank you so much,again.

[@artofjhill]

Idk it could be because of versions. You can always remake the graph

[@jackasswedge]

Is there a section here or other tutorial that demonstrates using xgen + unreal with animated dynamic characters?

[@artofjhill]

There are videos on KZbin about attaching a groom to a character