Hair Strand Experimentation in UE5 [Gif Heavy]

HarlequinWerewolf

Instead of actually finishing a full character, I am messing with hair strands in Unreal Engine 5.3. I really wanted to see how to set up the groom component, group IDs and physics properly. Shout out to Andrew Giovannini's tutorial for hair in Unreal!
I wanted to try a braid and figured this would look nice on my portfolio, so here's some early tests (as well as messing with a highlight mask):


And this is where I'm at physics wise:


I've also been tweaking the Meta Humans shader (as best I can) and have moved in the direction I wanted to:


So I'm leaving the braid here for now and moving on to a couple of other styles to mess with physics and shader stuff before making a big ol' portfolio post. Here's to the next steps!!

iam717

lmfao, that escalated quickly  Nothing to say, make more i guess.

HarlequinWerewolf

iam717 said:

lmfao, that escalated quickly  Nothing to say, make more i guess.

When in doubt, spin out? Right?

Tried to get some quality close ups of the strands. Pretty happy with these so time to make more hair!!

HarlequinWerewolf

Been editing the shader a bit more. Red is what I pulled from the Meta Human shader and the rest is for me. I ripped out a bunch of stuff from the Meta Human shader that didn't seem to work and after some Googling it seems that the shader doesn't work with custom strand hair. Which makes me think that there are other attributes Epic are adding to their hair that they haven't documented? But I'm honestly not sure. On another note, I don't think I'm going to dig any deeper than this: This lets me do what I need to do and that's good enough for me.

So I added a texture function where you can plug in a map that will colour the hair based on the Root UV. A root and tip value that adds a selected colour into the root or tip or both with a secondary colour value for more depth and a Root/Tip amount value to change how far along the strand the colour is. I also added a highlight mask where you can plug in a black and white texture and then overlay a colour over the white parts. When the texture map is set to true, it switches off the hair colour options (melanin values) to instead just use the texture colours. 
This is the additional values that apply on top of the base hair:

ThisisVictoriaZ

You are so good at making hair! Thank you for sharing so many resources on this, it can be really hard to find details on how people make good hair, at least from my experience 

HarlequinWerewolf

ThisisVictoriaZ said:

You are so good at making hair! Thank you for sharing so many resources on this, it can be really hard to find details on how people make good hair, at least from my experience 

Thank you so much! I haven't really shared anything about creating hair, but hopefully this helps with integrating into Unreal  

I made some tweaks to this hair and took some decent renders. Not sure I love the angles I've got here, but it's a good start 

Tits

That's some very cool experimentation here to say the least

HarlequinWerewolf

Thank you so much @Tits I need to whip up some more strands to keep testing!

HarlequinWerewolf

OK, so I said I wouldn't edit the shader much more but some things were still bothering me. I now have control to pull the root colour back to reveal the natural hair (controlled by the melanin editors) to make it look like the hair has been dyed and now the natural roots are growing in. I also removed a bunch of unnecessary stuff that was getting in the way in the editor. 





My issue now is that when I try to use the 'scraggle' effect from Epic's shader, I have no control over the amount. This effect would be super useful for textured hair but I can't get it working without it just being 'on'.

No scraggle:

Scraggle:


Changing the value does nothing noticeable - even if I set it to ridiculous numbers.

HarlequinWerewolf

I tried to use a texture to create a dyed pattern in the hair but I couldn't find a way to get decent resolution - even trying a mask instead of a whole texture.

So I got some advice and ended up just creating the hearts as their own description and went on to try a leopard dye pattern I'd seen online. 

These are still just 1 groom asset with 2 or 3 materials in place, the setup is just a bit more annoying

HarlequinWerewolf

Needed to take a break from personal work for a bit but I'm back with a new hairstyle (still needs some tweaks and final additions). 

I also fixed the 'scraggle'. I had inadvertantly deleted a group of nodes from the Epic strand shader that controlled the tangent of each strand. (my b). Anyway, added it back in and scraggle is good now. I think it'll be especially useful to help keep the CV count down when working on coily hair.

In my defence, the group of nodes do say "ToDo, remove and fix in code" so shout out to Epic from keeping their shaders clean 

HarlequinWerewolf

Some updated beauty renders. Going to put these 2 on an artstation post. I'd also like to pull together a little breakdown, just not sure what people want to see?



I also took a couple of gifs of how the guides look in engine. Each guide affects the surround strands in terms of physics sim. The guides for the braid were custom made and the guides for the pigtails were pulled from the xgen guides.

    

iam717

"what people want to see" - you will figure it out.

All the things, bouncy, bouncy, fun,fun,fun,fun,fun.

Cool hair styles & patterning.

HarlequinWerewolf

After a few months of picking at this and pulling everything I've learnt together, I finally made an ArtStation blog post about getting xgen strands into UE5! You can check it out here: https://www.artstation.com/blogs/leahmcewen/wBYX4/xgen-to-unreal-engine-5-breakdown-simulation-setup 
 

Along with the finished strand assets here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Nyl3QJ