Grooms for MetaHuman — Considerations
Hair, beards, eyebrows, eyelashes and peach fuzz. Hair is the part of a digital human that most often looks wrong, and period hairstyles are rarely in the MetaHuman library.
Two outputs per groom
| Output | Where it runs | How |
|---|---|---|
| Strands | Kiosk (Cine assembly), PC-VR | Alembic groom with required attributes, bound to the MetaHuman |
| Hair cards | Quest, Vive standalone, phones (Optimized) | Unreal Hair Card Generator (also available in Dataflow) from the strand groom, with generated groom textures |
Authoring options
| DCC | Route | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Maya XGen | MetaHuman Groom Starter Kit (Maya project) → Groom Exporter (MetaHuman for Maya) → Alembic | Epic's documented path; includes density map, noise, cut modifiers and width ramps |
| Blender (hair curves) | Alembic export with the required attributes | Community starter kits and tutorials exist (see Grooms — Tutorials) |
| Houdini | Groom tools → Alembic | Strongest for complex styles; needs a Houdini artist |
Required groom attributes (Unreal)
groom_width · groom_rootuv · groom_group_id · groom_id · groom_guides
Then create a Groom Binding to the MetaHuman skeletal mesh (one per body/head variant).
Steps
- Period reference: portraits, photographs, hair-dressing manuals of the year.
- Scalp and hairline from the sculpt; separate groups (hair, bun, brows, lashes, fuzz).
- Guides → interpolated hair; clumping, frizz and flyaways (period hair was not blow-dried).
- Export Alembic with attributes; import to Unreal; bind.
- Tune materials (melanin, redness, roughness); physics only where hair moves.
- Generate cards and groom textures for the Optimized assembly; check on Quest.
- Historian and costume sign-off.
Considerations for historical characters
- Period accuracy beats glamour. 1840s women's hair: center part, smooth over the ears, bun or coil at the back; caps indoors for Quaker women. Beards and sideburns follow the decade.
- Under-groom rather than over-groom. Modern volume and shine read as anachronistic.
- Performance. Strand hair is expensive; one character with strands on an RTX 5080 kiosk is fine; two characters may need a 5090 or cards for the second.
- Caps and bonnets are often cloth, not hair: model them in Marvelous Designer and hide hair beneath.
- Budget time. Grooms are where cheap builds fail; plan 3–6 weeks per figure for a contract groom artist.
Owner: groom artist. Tutorials: Grooms — Tutorials · start here: Tutorial — Period Hairstyles from Evidence → Tutorial — XGen Period Hair for MetaHuman
Sources: Sources — 2026-09-19