[Ue5] Groom Hair For Custom Metahumans In Unrealengine 5

Hello and welcome, if you liked today's tutorial, please like and subscribe, it really helps today. I want to try and work with groom, hair and either convert or create from scratch groom hair for this character. We begin today inside unreal engine 5.. Now i must stress, i am not an expert, i am not intermediate, i am a beginner with this stuff and i can only show you what i have learned so far. What i intend to do today is take studio, studio, hair, convert it using blender into groom hair that we can then place on this metahuman. I do not know if it is even possible, but i am going to try today if you have uh, maybe character creator or some other software large parts of this tutorial are going to apply to you too. So don't worry if you don't use dash studio. I am using dash studio to obtain our an obj of our hair, and that is it today. I would use another software, but daz is what i use. Okay with that being said, let's proceed. Here'S our character hannah. The first thing we need to do is obtain a static mesh of hannah's head anna's head is attached to a dash studio, genesis, a body if we zoom out there. We go. I it's from my previous tutorial. If you haven't checked that out, custom metahumans go and check that out. That'S where i attach this head to the body. Okay, so the first thing we need to do is create a static mesh, as i said, so we go to metahumans hana and face and we find this head mesh open it up. One moment it's on the wrong screen: there we go, there is anna's head and what i want to do is up here. You can click make static mesh. It will ask you where you want to store it. I actually want to store it in metahuman's hana base, and i want to call that face static, hana bass, static, mesh hit save now. I can close that, like so, and then in our content folder in metahuman's hana face. We now have this static mesh. It looks a little strange because the shaders are not correct, but that is fine for the purposes of this tutorial. That really is fine. Um there we go right. All we really need is a static mesh to export to blender. So with that being said, let me right, click asset actions, export and i want to go to my folder here. We go and export it as an fbx, so i untick level of detail. I don't really need collisions and make sure morph targets is unchecked, although there isn't no morph targets on this, this static mesh and that's it export now. The first thing i want to do is open blender, so i will do that now. Here we are inside blender. I am running 3.0.1 and i need to make sure that my screencast keys are enabled, so you can see what i'm doing there. We go now hit a and x to delete everything, go to import import fbx and we go to our folder, where i exported our static mesh to uncheck animation hit import. There we go if i do shift c it zooms us in there we go and we have a static mesh of our meta human head. Now, in an idea world, i would strip everything from the head, except the shape of the head, but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial today. So right now we have a head. What i want to do this time is, i want to instantly export this and i want to export it as an obj to the same folder again and we'll call this anna face static and ue5, it's just so i can identify it in the geometry section. I don't think we need to change anything, no okay, so just export that i've done this, so we've got now got on obj and we have an fbx. What i want to do now is move over to dash studio. Obviously, if you don't use dash studio at this point, you would use your own software whatever it is that you use to create hair and then you you would export in the way that you would export from that. But i i will use dash studio for the next bit. So if you want to skip that, please do but know that by the end of it i will have an obj with our hair. Here we are inside dash studio and i've loaded in a dev or development genesis, 8 character. Next, i want to import a metahuman head, so let me go to tutorials, and here it is hannah, face static, ue5. Let me open that up. It may take a while because there's quite a lot of geometry, and i think this i think this is all right. Let me try it. This is the first time i've done this remember, you are learning with me and what i'm doing is importing the metahuman head. As an obj, so i can try and scale our genesis 8 character to roughly match, particularly the head. I want that to roughly match our meta human head. I forgive me that didn't work. Let me try again import and hana face static, ue5 and i need to make sure we are set to z y, so it's x, y z and here first, what i did is choose blender like so then choose zed here, and it will switch these for you And then here we need to set this to 10 000. So there we go, ten thousand hit import and there you go. Our metahuman head is now in our scene right what i want. It actually looks pretty close already, i'm going to be honest with you. I don't think we're gon na have to be doing much with this. Let'S just move it into place and spin around and just take a look yeah. It is pretty much already pretty good for this particular meta human. This is not crucial. It'S just it's going to work a lot better. If your meta human head is the same size, so i think, with the genesis 8 character, i am going to scale it down. Just slightly to 99.5 yep, so you see it is now pretty close fantastic. Now we can delete our meta human head, we don't need it and now what i'm going to do is go and find some hair in my library i probably should have done this first uh. I will do that one moment. The hair i've chosen is nerve fashion. Stylized bob, which is this - i don't want to go any longer than this, because inside unreal engine 5 we're going to run into problems with collision on the body, and that is beyond what i want to do today, that that will extend the tutorial massively. So i think we're going to struggle with this, so i may have to shorten it in blender, but for now this is what i have. This is not strand based hair. This is not a strand based hair tutorial that will come in the future, but for today i just want to keep this as simple as possible. I do want to play with some of these morphs just to get a more unique style there. We go. Probably there right so what i'm going to do. First, is i just want to see how many pieces this hair is in it's it's actually a one piece, that's great! That'S what we want. Sometimes these hairstyles come in they'll, have a scalp and and different parts and you're going to have to export those and combine them in this case. I don't have to do that, and i am reasonably happy with that right. So i'm going to export this, make sure that i have it selected. Oh, forgive me export as an obj and that's the mouse king tutorial folder. We don't want that one and there we go and we will call this bob hair and hit save, and these are the settings i have. I will leave them up for a moment. Scale is at one percent: uh filtered object, is two selected routes and so on right hit accept and we will send that over. What i want to do now is close desk studio back inside blender. What we need first, i already have the plugin we're going to be using this daz hair converter plugin here this is not my plugin, but i have it on my github. Let me bring that across for you. So if you go to github and my github, we have currently this. You would download this zip file here by clicking on it and then go to blender preferences go to add-ons click install and at this point you would choose the zip file you just installed and then you would install it make sure it is enabled, and then this Panel will pop up here. Does hair converter with that installed. We need to import our hair, so go to import away from obj. There is our bob hair under geometry: select, keep vertex order and tick polygroups and that's it import and there you go, as you can see, he's still coming very large look, but let's just move it down into place and see how far off we are yeah. It'S still quite large, but we will get to that for now. I want you to hide the hair up here and we're going to need a scalp. This hair does come with a scalp and we're going to remove that, and let me show you that in fact, let's hide the meta human head and go to the hair, and only if you can see inside there, there is a scalp or a cap, and we Will be removing that, in fact, let's do that right now, so select the hair hit tab to go into edit mode deselect everything by clicking off anywhere go to our material properties, go to scalp hit select there, it is hit p click selection and it has now Separated the scalp into a separate mesh. So if we go back to our object mode by hitting tab - and we hide the hair look, we just have the scalp left over and now. Obviously i want to do this. I want to replace this scalp with the metahuman scalp, so the first thing i'm going to do is just actually line up our metahuman by hitting g and bringing it up slightly and why there we go. I think so, as you can see it's slightly bigger the dazz hair cap and i think i think that's good, because normally, if you haven't got that cap, let me just hide that daz cap for a moment you would have to enlarge this by scaling it up. Just slightly so it's it's larger, so your hair is a lot slightly larger, obviously than your metahuman head, but we don't need to do that in this case. I think looking at this, i'm actually going to not create a haircut in this instance. Oh no. I must because a lot of you might not be using dash studio okay, so i will do that. Let me hide the dash studio cap and select our metahuman head go into edit mode click off, and what we need to do is come up here and select faces. I want to zoom in a little so we can see what we're working with and what i'm going to do is hit c, and it gives us this circle and now we can just literally and we want to create the shape of a cap like so now. I am terrible at this, so i might have to speed up the video. I really am terrible at that. Anyway. This is the hair cap. We have it's not perfect, but for this tutorial it will do and with that selected shift d to duplicate and then left click on your mouse without moving the mouse. So we don't move it and that's click create a duplicate. We then hit p and click selection, and now, if we go back into object mode by hitting tab, we should have a separate mesh that we just created. The first thing i want to do with our new cap is make sure it's selected, rename it meta cat. So we know, and then i want to rename the the dazz cap daz cap, i'm going to try and not use the dust cap. I will use the meta cap, so everybody can follow along, but i do like that as one better right anyway. So with that selected, we want to go to vertex groups, there's no vertex groups, good good right and going to edit mode by hitting tab again a to select all and what i want to do is assign the material and let's rename this to cap this material. Once again hit a sign now, we've assigned a material to it. I want to come to vertex groups and, although it's not that important we're going to call this cap - and i think oh sorry - hit sign after you've created cap and that's it go back into object mode, and our cap now has a vertex group and a material. Next, we want to go to our bob haircut and show it again: let's zoom out shift c to so we can see the whole thing and yeah. I think it is slightly larger not to worry, let's just hide it a moment and show our metahuman head right. First thing is: first select our cap and also hold shift. Select, our metahuman go to object, apply all transforms, and then i'm going to select our cap, and with that done, i want to scale up slightly there we go just so. The cap is slightly bigger than the meta human head right and then go back to object, apply all transforms again and now we're going to enable the hair. So we can see it and now we're going to adjust the hair, so it fits over our metahuman head. I reckon it needs scaling down a little, let's just grab first yep, so s to scale, and it just looks a little bit too big to me right and grab his head on the z-axis. There we go and i think that's fine. Let me go to x. Let'S pull it forward a little probably to there. What we can do is look inside by hitting x-ray or if you actually select your metahuman head. You can see the outline look, so maybe we can pull it a little bit further. I don't want to do too much there we go and let's look at the metal human get yep. That'S fine! Yeah! For the purposes of the tutorial. That'S absolutely fine, okay! So next what i want to do is convert this into particles. Let us do some quick housekeeping, select the hair, the bob hair go to material properties and from this drop down, remove unused slots and that will just remove the scalp material and so on and on our metacat. We don't need to do that on the cap. Do we, i don't think nope nope, okay and what we can do now, and i suggest you do it is do a bit of sculpting give yourself so, with hair selected, go to the sculpting tab shift c to zoom in no, it's not doing it zoom in There we go, i would use my middle mouse button to zoom in, but it's really not working very well in a minute. I need a new mouse right, so i just want to sculpt some of this away from here, because when we apply groom physics, it will kind of move in inwards. So if it's a little bit further, if it's you can't see my hands, but basically i'm parting. This hair, so let me just make sure i can see i want to enable mirroring on the x-axis and increase the radius, and i think i'm going to use a snake hook just to pull the hair out like this, and i want to do it around the Face as well look just slightly and these ends, i definitely want to pull those out like so, and i'm going to pull the hair up slightly like that and then let's look here, let's look from the back pull the hair out outwards just slightly like this, and Then i want to pull out the back, it's just so i'm pulling it away from the meta human head. Basically, so we don't get hair going through the head when we convert it to groom right. Can we see inside that looks? Okay? I think, let's just pull it, make sure it's pulled away from the eyes as well. There we go, don't worry if it's a little bit further away, because when, when we simulate it, oh sorry when we convert it to groom hair and simulate physics, it will drop back down. I think that's fine. I didn't. I do oops all right. That was way too far. Okay, he's probably gon na look terrible, but let me just yep there. You go so basically sculpt your hair to how you like it. Once you are happy with your sculpt. We can then go back to object mode and select our hair. In fact, first hide your metahuman head, like so select your hair, select the cap and then come over to our das plugin. By going to uh sorry, our das hair converter. If i go in daz click in here hit convert and that's it. We now have particle hair, fantastic right. Uh did i already set yep to strip? That'S great, make sure this is set to strip play around with it. You might have better results with strand right. So here is our particle hair. If we click on particles, it's our particle hair system and what i want to do is in the details of this go to hair shape and for my purposes i want to choose zero, zero. Five and as you can see it just thickens up the hair, you experiment with that yourself and you may find different values work for your hair, but for the purposes of this i quite like that. I do maybe i will just scale the whole thing up to 0.2 um. That may be a bit too thick, but i'll. Try it anyway right. So the next thing we need to do is come to here where it says, render untick, show emitter and we'll do that in the viewport as well. On viewport display, untick, show emitter, and then you can see it's remove the cap. Now i want to come to our name here, and i want to name this hair now, because it's no longer a cap, it's hair before i export to the engine. I just i'm not happy with how this looks. I can see the head cap in there and i know there's going to be too much hair here and it looks too big around the cap. So what i'm going to do is ensure i thin out the hair first, so i can do that by going to children yep and i will set children to 15.. As you can see just it lowers our count. Yep, that's a lot thinner and then i think i'm going to cut this hair. So if i come up here and go to particle edit mode and i choose cut again - i'm not used to doing this kind of thing. So this is only the second time. I'Ve tried it so cut and maybe if we just started about here and just cut like so off, it's probably too much me take the strength down and then just cut. I want to keep the basic shape, but just cut it back like so right. I'Ve had a couple of practice runs and i am now happy with this version of the hair. It looks slightly thin, but inside unreal engine it seems to look okay. So, having said that, i'm going to select our hair right. Click export go to alembic.abc. I do have various versions here but, as i said, i just had a couple of practice runs to make sure i get this right and i will name this bob hair version. Five go to scale set to 100, go to end, choose one selected objects and visible objects, ensure that your hair is selected and and that's it hit export. And now that should export to the engine, and i will see you inside the engine here we are back inside unreal engine 5. now because i haven't done it yet or if i haven't done it at the beginning of the tutorial. I can't quite remember, go to plugins type in groom and ensure that our alembic groom importer is enabled the engine you will have to restart the engine. When you enable this plugin with the plugin enabled you can right. Click in your folder that you created import to gain metahuman's hana is that where we are within metahuman's hana female hair, custom, hair wow, that's quite long, and then we choose our bob hair version 5 there, which i've just exported from blender hit open. If it's done correct, if you've exported correctly and you're and to a alembic file, then you will get this dialog box. It will say: status file, valid in rotation, i've set x to 90 and in scale i've set y to minus one hit import. This is what we've got: it's not a bad groove, i quite like that anyway. So before i do any physics do don't enable the physics or anything. Yet, let's close that and i want to go to our bob hair right click and create a binding and it'll. Ask you for a skeletal, a target skeletal mesh. In this case we are using hana, so i will search for hana hana face mesh and we should we select our hana face mesh and then hit create and just hit save and that's it. We'Ve created a groom binding for our hair. Now, if we select our character again, i'm not going to touch the physics or anything for the moment, select our character hit edit blueprint, okay with our character, blueprint open. I now want to add hair to do this select face, hit, add type in groom and choose a groom and name this pair okay, hit, compile and save come over here to the details. Panel, go to groom asset and choose our groom asset that we just created. Oh sorry that we just imported in my case - that's bob hair version. Five and there you go uh, hit, compile and save then go to binding asset, and we need our binding asset. In this case, bob hair version 5. There we go hit, compile and save in materials. When you imported your metahuman, you will have got a hair material with that, usually it starts with mi and then hair. I'Ve got quite a lot because in this project there's a lot of metahumans from various tutorials, and so i think i'm going to choose this one. For now it's like a brown color, but obviously you can open up your material and you can change anything you want and with the current version of metahumans, you can even choose a hair dye, so that is in my promo shop for this hair dye um. How do we enable hair dye? Oh sorry, you have to reset all these to know, point one, no point one and then save and then, if we go back, she should have green hair. You see okay now, obviously i don't want to have green hair. But the point is made oops right so i'll leave it with that hair for a moment and then with the binding complete. If i add an animation, we everything should move together. So i click on body and i'm just going to use a test animation. Our idol and everything's moving fine okay. So let me disable that again right go back to the hair click on your groom asset or double click. There we go, and i want to make some changes now before i enable simulation. First, i'm going to change the sub steps to a minimum of six. You can do more uh, but it will use more resources. Then i want to come down and for now i want to set the bend stiffness quite eye. You may find a different value works. Better for you, i'm going to set it to one in fact, and then the collision radius, i'm going to set that to 5. Now again, that's quite high and i think, for the purposes of this tutorial that might be okay. I don't want to touch anything in the strand size or anything, that's going too far. But what i found is by editing these values. You can change the shape of the hair as well. If it's in the face, or or in a part that you don't want it let's get to here and enable simulation, this could take a while, depending on on what your settings are, etc. Uh. This is actually fine, it's already done it, and so now we have. It'S very difficult without a fast animation, which i don't have at the moment, but there we go. We have a groom attached to our metahuman with physics, fantastic, i'm doing some final editing. I'Ve adjusted the color of the hair. There we go. I'Ve made it kind of this blue color to match the jacket, and with that we can hit play and we are finished. You choose longer hair you're going to have problems with collision in the body. I don't know how to solve that. Yet i'm just not smart enough, i guess - or i haven't learned enough, and so i still have problems with hair going through the body. If anybody knows how to solve that, that would be fantastic. I have tried applying uh, correct physics to the body and then enabling all collisions, and it just seems to make no difference whatsoever, but with that, i think that is a great place to leave this tutorial. Thank you for watching. If you liked today's tutorial, then please like and subscribe, it really helps if you've got any questions. Please, in the comment section, and i will try my very best to answer more tutorials - are on the way until then bye, bye. For now you