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

[@genkidama7385]

hey man, you're the only person on earth covering unreal engine groom system, their documentation is not even able to explain things properly, that one has to go to youtube and find your videos to fully understand how the hell their stuff should be used.

[@MarvelMaster]

I know right^^ Many people also me have to use free software like blender so I had to find ways to use it :)

[@hypnoticatrance]

Welcome to UE Documentation :)

[@aweidenhammer]

Allright. I'm pretty sure I found the source of my/our crash-on-import issues. I've now gotten 30k+ curves into unreal no problem at all. I made a simple test scene that worked fine, and added features until it died. Clumping - fine, grooming -fine, modified length -fine, lots of curves - fine. The crash happens for me when a groom uses textures to modify parameters. I haven't tested all the params, but I'm guessing using textures to modify any param is the issue. I was using painted textures to modify density, and that kills it. So advanced grooms using textures to change hair properties are at risk of crashes. If you remove them, you should be able to import just fine. Marvel Master, I thank you for this video, as it definitely got me on track to getting this working. I hope this comment helps someone out there.

[@HutchstarEnt]

awesome tutorial I can confirm this works in version 5 ( EA2 ) for anyone using that.

[@scottcourtney8878]

Terrific tutorial. I'm experienced in other tools but fairly new to Unreal, and I found this extremely easy to understand. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

[@MrSuvidh]

This works with 2.93LTS!

[@3sgamestudio]

I was looking for that! Thank you!

[@SHA3DOW_]

Yo, you here too ❤️❤️

[@veganjackbauer2154]

13:45 The interpolation settings don't work when you change them from here, but they work when you set them up when reimporting the hair asset in the Reimport popup under Preview -> ... . They seem to change the quality of the hair children.

[@kangsan9687]

WHEN I TRY TO IMPORT THE HAIR FROM BLENDER. I CANNOT SEE THE HAIR.. CAN YOU GUESS THE REASON WHY . I TRIED EXACT SAME STEP MORE THAN 10 TIMES. WHEN I MOVE THE HAIR INTO VIEWPORT IT SHOW GIZMO BUT NOT HAIR. WHEN I DOUBLE CLICK HAIR ON THE BROWSWER THERE IS NO HAIR.. PLEASE HELP....

[@MarvelMaster]

Yes... Mac

[@bydlaczek1000]

@@MarvelMaster Same problem

[@burnsaga]

Nice Wookiee :P Thanks Marvel Master

[@ChaojianZhang]

Thanks! Solved my issue with exporting!

[@TheSmileyFps]

Hello I love your videos but did u find any solution to import groom from daz3d?

[@MarvelMaster]

Daz3d does not do strandbased hair

[@ronioclarenzo6137]

Excellent tutorial! Very useful, from A to Z! Don't be thrown off by the 'lazy-looking' hair grooms in the vid - the guy knows how to make a good tutorial!

[@user-ch7zm1iw5v]

best men in the world

[@dimitardimitrov7950]

Thank you so match grate tutorial. My sniper ghillie suit will be grate now :D

[@Jobutsu]

Just what I was looking for, thanks so much.

[@NN-mi8hv]

my fps drop hard with the groom system lol but thankyou for the tutorials

[@MarvelMaster]

Jeah it can be very Taxing on the system

[@cgndev]

Thank you. Marvel. It was very helpful to me.

[@ATech3D]

With this workflow can you export UV root to get the correct colors from a texture map? Thanks.

[@MarvelMaster]

Nope... I hope someone can talk to the blender devs to get that working somehow... Also working base colors would be so cool

[@JanSeliv1]

Wow amazing thank you so much I really looked for it

[@KingKong19100]

Hey there, I keep running into an issue around the time where I am supposed to create a binding asset. For some reason, Unreal Engine keeps crashing on me every time I try to do this. Do you have a solution for this? Thanks!

[@MarvelMaster]

Try with a very simple groom maybe

[@KingKong19100]

@@MarvelMaster For now I'm just converting my hair to a mesh in Blender then using the data transfer modifier to make them share the same weights. But do you know how to make the hair texture share the texture of the mesh in Unreal?

[@MarvelMaster]

Mesh? Ue4 hair works with alembic

[@IronPaul]

how to dye curls of hair in different colors?

[@MarvelMaster]

Not possible in Blender

[@RicoCilliers]

great tutorial dude!

[@1d33f1x3]

Very helpful, and easy to follow. Thank you!

[@pinglocalhost]

Thank you, keep coming out with this videos :)

[@3sgamestudio]

a video on how to convert strand based hair (with hair cards) into groom would be amazing!

[@MarvelMaster]

just use hairnet

[@tehf00n]

Thank you this was super helpful to get started.

[@nairuna7436]

Hey, i have a big problem: my ue4 crashed if i tried to import the abc files. I tried it before but had no problems but i had to stop the import because of really long loading time. i made just to expensive fut. the only thing I edtited was to decimate the children render amount. I really dont know what to do! Assertion failed: PointCount > 1 [File:D:/Build/++UE4/Sync/Engine/Plugins/Runtime/HairStrands/Source/HairStrandsCore/Private/GroomBuilder.cpp] [Line: 881] this is the error report i guess, i am really new to ue4

[@MarvelMaster]

Just reduce the hair count

[@scottlee38]

Very cool!

[@markturanfoxy]

I used this workflow to export hair from Blender with success before the release of Blender 3.0, and after 3.0 (in which they sightly modified the Alembic export menu) I get insanely huge files when I export alembic files from Blender, which then I can't import into Unreal due to very long import times. Anyone had similar problems?

[@MarvelMaster]

You sure you did not use 250 frames instead of 1?

[@arashi8876]

Thank you, Master ♡

[@王永昌-z4o]

I love your tutorial，You Are A Great Man!The leader of grooming hair of blender. I have an question, is the grooming hair system in UE4.26 can apply in the game widely?such as a lot of zombies with each grooming hair. Can computer work it smoothly?

[@cgeye292]

Is there any change in Unreal Engine 5? or it's the same workflow? Awesome tuts by the way.

[@mp7_zz]

My import failed. She told me: For more information, please refer to the output log. But it didn't tell me why. I followed the instructions, but no success. Does anyone know why? Thank you

[@MarvelMaster]

maybe too much hair?

[@mp7_zz]

@@MarvelMaster I tried to import the least amount of hair and the result was the same. I have tried almost all hair teaching many times, but there is no way to succeed. Should I need to reinstall UE4? Is it because the software did not detect that I opened the GROOM?

[@RikkTheGaijin]

How do I bind it to the head joint? It only binds to the body

[@MarvelMaster]

Select head bone in blueprint

[@mattbella6014]

Terrific tutorial! Thank You.

[@migi847]

Oky so this works perfectly, Have you tired importing a lot of fur ? Like a animal body full of fur, when i do it unreal engine crashes, If I reduce the fur amount drastically it works,I have 64 gb ram o na ryzen 3900 , rtx 2080. More like an Unreal issue noh.

[@MarvelMaster]

Hm I have. Hair with 200000 strands performance is low but no crash... 64gb ram 16core gtx1080ti

[@dannymiranda1309]

How many characters with dynamic hair can unreal handle at once.... surely the game will suffer having multiple characters just wondering if you’ve tried

[@MarvelMaster]

Version 4.25 was bad at handling multiple... But for example the new meta humans by epic have each 6 groom assets attach iirc

[@faradaysinfinity]

just a quick question can you do this export workflow in 4.26, then migrate the character and alembic into 4.25.4?

[@MarvelMaster]

You can use the blender workflow also for 4.25^^ directly

[@王永昌-z4o]

I love your tutorial，You Are A Great Man!The leader of grooming hair of blender. I have an question, is the grooming hair system in UE4.26 can apply in the game widely?such as a lot of zombies with each grooming hair. Can computer work it smoothly?

[@MarvelMaster]

Groom is very expensive with many hair and substeps...you have to try

[@philippecoenen]

Hi, Thank you so much! I'll try very soon. (I'll let you know how it works) It would be great to have a tutorial dedicated to collisions...

[@MarvelMaster]

I am thinking about doing a tutorial about collision

[@RWBKelly]

Good stuff. Thanks for the tuts. Having issues but will ge there. Question. I've an animated character in blender that I want to bring in with the groom. Do I set the frame range still to 1 frame and let unreal physics do the hair dynamics? Cheers

[@MarvelMaster]

Yes the export settings are just for the hair animations are seperate

[@harganator8515]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to make this! I was wondering, if you were setting up a character's groom from Blender that had separate sections like eyebrows/beard/hair groom , would you also import these all as one combined Alembic file? Or would you import these separately? I just wonder because of when you demonstrate attaching the groom file to the character, there looked like there was only one slot. Also how would you approach the shading/look development for the hair? Would you set up the hair shader in Blender and export/import that? Or do you set up the hair shaders entirely within Unreal? Thank you!

[@MarvelMaster]

Seperate parts on one mesh in blender export as one whole part afaik. But you can attach multiple groom assets to one character and therefore have to make the groom in blender completely seperate. And the shading is done completely in unreal there is docs for it... Also blender does not export any shader settings

[@TheFrozenFlame05]

I don't get it. I'm following the tutorial exactly but every time I try and import the alembic file into ue4 as a groom, nothing appears in the groom editor. Even when I change the width. It says that there are the correct number of strands, but nothing I do makes them show up in the groom editor or in-game.

[@MarvelMaster]

Mac computer?

[@TheFrozenFlame05]

@@MarvelMaster yes

[@MarvelMaster]

@@TheFrozenFlame05 mac is not supported for ue4 groom

[@TheFrozenFlame05]

@@MarvelMaster ooh. Thank you, I’ve been looking for a solution or a reason for like a month. Great tutorial, I’ll definitely try again when I get a windows computer.

[@5ucAyman]

hey, could you link the documentation you found (14:05)? I want to try out that with the cards and Mesh!

[@MarvelMaster]

Sure.. Where it says cards but it's really not much docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/WorkingWithContent/Hair/GroomAssetEditor/index.html#cards

[@bernhard.design]

Cool. Do you know how to bind the groom to an animated alembic.abc file?

[@MarvelMaster]

Don't think that it's possible it's only bound sk bones

[@PautaGamerOficial]

Very cool man. Do you know how can i do hair appears on ray traced mirror? Thanks.

[@MarvelMaster]

Have seen that issue, but don't have a solution. Somebody in the forum wrote you could try enabling rtx reflection visibility of emitter in the Niagara system.

[@mmcc2852]

is there a way to exxport metahuman groom as abc alembic?

[@MarvelMaster]

Hm dont think so

[@MarkOfArgyll]

Once again you come to the rescue with a great tutorial! Do you know of any resources that could help in designing hair/fur etc?

[@MarvelMaster]

there are plenty tutorials on youtube, I found this very good kzbin.info/www/bejne/qWqxdY1rppiGl6c

[@aweidenhammer]

Thank you for the tutorial, but for me, the abc file crashes Unreal on import. It shows the window when I chose to import. It says valid file, but crashes every time I continue by hitting Import.

[@aweidenhammer]

It seems someone mentioned that using interpolated children is problematic because Unreal isn't importing over 15000 curves in this method. But I can't get any amount to import using interpolated children

[@aweidenhammer]

Also realize that the amount of curves Blender exports is based on the render amount, even when you're setting it to use viewport for abc.

[@MarvelMaster]

Be sure to not use extreme values in Blender for any hair setting... For example tip Scale 0 will also crash the engine

[@veganjackbauer2154]

Thanks for the tutorial! Have you found a way to transfer the hair weights (when you go to Particle Edit in Blender) to UE4? Let's say you want some hair not to move with physics, then I set a weight of 1 in Blender, it works in Blender but in UE4 the hair still moves

[@MarvelMaster]

No blender exports noting but the strands unfortunately...so you need to use multiple assets

[@veganjackbauer2154]

@@MarvelMaster ow i see thanks, so some complicated haircuts that need different weights along the same hair are not possible, that’s ok anyway simpler is better

[@depoanimation4850]

Thanks for the tutorial , but I can’t get everything to work ( after I import hair to unreal from blender ( double checked all the settings and the checkboxes ) I get some wiered stuff - export is valid , asset gets imported but I can’t see it in viewport. I tried increasing thickness , and making different materials, but it doesn’t work ( can you please give me a piece of advice ? I’m using Mac

[@MarvelMaster]

Apple is not supported

[@depoanimation4850]

@@MarvelMaster thanks . That’s a pity (

[@ScifiSiShredaholic]

SPACE HAIR :)

[@johnny5hannover803]

I cant find the Plugin... what do i wrong? my window looks a little different, I can only display "build in" and not "all" as in the video. And I don't have any "geometry" to choose from. Sorry, I'm pretty new ...

[@MarvelMaster]

Which ue4 version are you at

[@johnny5hannover803]

@@MarvelMaster you are right... i dont know why but the first automatic installation was 4.19? the current version works. If you like, I would love a tutorial on how to change a character's hair via blueprints. I'm thinking about a game that creates animals (always the same model) with different fur properties ... E.g. that one time a dog with short white hair and the next time a dog with long black hair is spawned ... is this possible? btw... thx for this easy to understand tutorials...

[@MarvelMaster]

@@johnny5hannover803 you can just change groom assets in blueprint but not access any settings.

[@ddskec772]

Does this method crash even with a packaged executable?

[@MarvelMaster]

Don't think so

[@ddskec772]

@@MarvelMaster I understand. I'll give it a try.

[@SuperEvilstyle]

hair simulation wind,how to do?

[@MarvelMaster]

I heard that you can make this in a custom solver

[@brandonhaner739]

does this work for film as-well or just for video game?

[@MarvelMaster]

It's more intended for film than games^^

[@brandonhaner739]

@@MarvelMaster does it work for metahumans? Or is it characters youve already created in belnder/mannequins from unreal engine. Im trying to create long curly hair for a metahuman as they dont have that option in the hair selections.

[@MarvelMaster]

@@brandonhaner739 you can export the metahuman to blender and create the hair there and then import the hair

[@brandonhaner739]

So i would export the metahuman head as FBX file, create the hair and import the head with the hair or hair by itself?

[@MarvelMaster]

@@brandonhaner739 I think you only import the hair then like in the video

[@AztekIsTheBest]

is this method okey put in a game?

[@MarvelMaster]

If you get good performance out of it

[@mikeholmes3203]

I appreciate it, I was able to get my Bristles into UE4 using this but I can't figure out how to keep it all one piece in UE4, I have a handle Static mesh, some text (static mesh)for handle and the Groom (Bristles) everything imports fine into UE4 but I can't keep the bristle attached to the handle, when I go into the skeleton I attach the handle to the right_Thumb2 bone and the animation plays, but no way to set the groom to the socket, any Ideas, and googling is useless most are using for hair for character.

[@MarvelMaster]

Make sure to add the groom to the mesh and not the root of the character bp

[@mikeholmes3203]

@@MarvelMaster how do I add it to a skeletal mesh? couldn't find a way, i could add the handle to a bone but groom was not in attach, and I had it attached to the handle before attaching to skeleton

[@MarvelMaster]

@@mikeholmes3203 watch 6:30

[@mikeholmes3203]

@@MarvelMaster Ok I found that before and if I do this and drop in level it is fine can drag around fine, but when I go into the Skeleton Tree in SK_Mannequinn Mesh and I make a socket and attach the brush to the Character under Thumb_02_r Socket only the brush handle shows up using the static mesh, I made a BP for brush to work, but can't add that blueprint to his hand. so when the animation for him plays it will not have the bristles, unless there is some other way to wave the wand! and I am no Harry Potter :) seen some that are and they blow my mind

[@mikeholmes3203]

​@@MarvelMaster Ok I got it on the skeleton but still not in his hand, i have a socket on sk mannequin but doesn't show up in 3rd person char bp under parent socket, well that is strange if I select groom which is a child of handle I can select the socket, but handle stays put :)

[@6Amarok9]

thx for tutorial but i am trying this on PC. Problem is alembic import settings coming weird and there is just static mesh option. No groom.

[@MarvelMaster]

Did you enable the plugins? And did you realy check the right checkboxes in blender?

[@6Amarok9]

@@MarvelMaster Absolutely i did. But Its working when convert hair as a curve before a crush XD. (ue 4.26.1 - blender 2.91)

[@MarvelMaster]

@@6Amarok9 be aware that converted to curve will crash the engine in packaged project

[@FX_AnimationStudios]

Hi MarvelMaster.. Im trying to follow the tutorial but when i export from blender 2.92 I get an instant crash and the alembic file gets corrupted... any ideas? i tried 2.92, 2.91, 2.83 LTS no go :(

[@MarvelMaster]

Maybe too many hair or too extreme values like 0 size for the root or tip

[@FX_AnimationStudios]

@@MarvelMaster nah..made sure of that.. i even exported just the guides around 1000.. and it crashed :(

[@MarvelMaster]

@@FX_AnimationStudios try a basic groom with no edits

[@FX_AnimationStudios]

@@MarvelMaster Hi.. I tried that and it works (kind of) after it worked I kept trying several exports as I edit the hair..they all worked, ended up with about 7 different alembics according to the edit i kept doing.. but.. as soon as I save the blender file and re-opened and exported it..blender crashes :(

[@MarvelMaster]

@@FX_AnimationStudios there is a bug.... Blender crashes when you have layers/scenes not visible so make sure everything is set to visible

[@idcrafter-cgi]

does groom finally work on Linux?

[@MarvelMaster]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@Jeet3D]

It works only partially on Linux, the groom itself is visible and looks like on windows, but the binding asset and physics asset don't work as of 4.26.0.

[@migi847]

I followed the steps, But when I import to unreal the alembic import options widow comes not the groom. Blender 2.91 and UE 4.26 , Alembic export options in blender exactly as you mentioned.

[@MarvelMaster]

Did you enable the groom plug in?

[@migi847]

@@MarvelMaster yes

[@MarvelMaster]

Show me the blender export window

[@migi847]

@@MarvelMaster ibb.co/wWW4TwR

[@migi847]

@@MarvelMaster I just tried doing it in a new file, it works, there must be something in my file, ilo check , thanks.

[@enochi7239]

Found a small problem where if you are editing the hair in blender and using a kink (I was using "wave") the hair glitches when importing it to Unreal. So to circumvent that either remove the "wave" kink or use the older method of exporting the curves and then reimporting. (the older method that Marvel Master uploaded) Edit: Tried it some more and apparently every kink works fine after editing some parameters. Can't figure out exactly what parameter blender exports weirdly, but it's worth experimenting if you are having problems!

[@MarvelMaster]

Don't use extreme values in Blender like 0 they don't seem to work... Also the old workflow does not. Work in packed projects