Tutorial — Period Facial Hair Grooms

Augmented Traveler local tutorial. Back to Grooms — Tutorials · evidence: Tutorial — Period Hairstyles from Evidence · XGen steps: Tutorial — XGen Period Hair for MetaHuman · headsets: Tutorial — Hair Cards and Groom LODs for Headsets

Whaling captains (Veeder, Brock and others) need chin curtains, mutton chops, full beards and moustaches that move with speech. This tutorial covers choosing the style from evidence, grooming it on the face region, binding it so it follows the jaw, and making cards for headsets.

Draft. Epic has no dedicated facial-hair tutorial. What we confirmed: MetaHuman Creator has separate mustache and beard groom slots (plus eyebrows, eyelashes and peach fuzz), and custom grooms of these types can be packaged as Wardrobe Items. The binding and jaw-follow steps below are our plan from the general groom docs. Test on the first captain before committing.

1. Styles and evidence

Style What it is Period evidence Use for
Chin curtain / Shenandoah Full growth along the jaw and chin meeting the sideburns; upper lip shaved. Also called "whaler", "Lincoln", "Amish beard" Wikipedia (secondary) lists "whaler" as a name. Confirm in NHA photographs Captains, 1850s onward, if photographs show it
Mutton chops / side-whiskers Long whiskers down the cheeks, chin shaved FIT: fashionable in the 1860s ("muttonchops", "Dundreary whiskers"); full muttonchops the mode in the 1870s Captains and merchants, 1860s–70s
Full beard Cheeks, chin and moustache WVU example c.1870; FIT: clean-shaven faces rare in the 1870s Older captains, 1860s–80s
Moustache Upper lip only, often with side-whiskers FIT: trim moustaches in the 1870s Later scenes
Clean-shaven — FIT: men in the 1840s "usually clean-shaven"; facial hair began late in the decade Essex-era and 1840s scenes: default to clean-shaven unless evidence says otherwise

Rules:

2. Groups

Split facial hair so each part can be tuned and hidden:

Group Contents
beard_jaw Jawline and chin
beard_cheek Side-whiskers down the cheeks
moustache Upper lip (omit for a chin curtain)
sideburns Join between head hair and beard
neck Under-jaw growth, sparse

Eyebrows and peach fuzz stay separate grooms (Creator has their own slots).

3. Groom it in XGen

Follow the Starter Kit route in Tutorial — XGen Period Hair for MetaHuman, with these changes:

  1. Surface. Groom on the face region of the MetaHuman head mesh (the kit's MH Groom Head). The beard must root on the same surface the binding will use.
  2. Density map.
    • Chin curtain: paint the upper lip and cheeks to zero. Keep a hard edge on the cheek line, a soft fade on the neck.
    • Mutton chops: zero on the chin and lip; full on the cheeks.
  3. Guides. Beard hair grows down and slightly forward on the jaw, down and back on the cheeks, outward from the lip centre. Place guides along these flows.
  4. Modifiers.
    • Clumping stronger than head hair; beards clump.
    • Noise moderate. A working seaman's beard is not combed smooth. Ask the historian about grooming habits.
    • Cut for uneven ends.
  5. Width a little thicker than head hair (check against the photograph at kiosk scale).
  6. Mouth clearance. Keep strands off the lips' inner edge so they don't cross into the mouth when it opens.
  7. Export with MetaHuman → Groom Exporter, one groom_group_id per group (max 15 per asset).

4. Bind so it follows the jaw

The face moves the beard. Speech, jaw open and smiles must carry the roots.

  1. Import the .abc into UE 5.8 (Groom and Alembic Groom Importer plugins; Support Compute Skin Cache on).
  2. Right-click the Groom Asset → Create Binding. Set the target to the same head/face skeletal mesh the facial animation drives.
  3. Add the Groom component as a child of that face/head mesh and assign the binding. (MetaHuman Blueprints list hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, fuzz, mustache and beard as separate groom components; which mesh each attaches to in 5.8 is unconfirmed; check in the Blueprint.)
  4. Test with real performance: play a monologue take with wide vowels, a laugh and a head turn.
    • Roots should stay on the skin at jaw open.
    • No gap between sideburns and head hair.
  5. Physics: off for short beards. For a long full beard on the kiosk, enable simulation with high stiffness; collide against the physics asset so the beard doesn't pass through the chest or collar.
  6. Skinned attachment and RBF interpolation are not supported on mobile. On phones, check jaw-follow on the card version specifically.

Known gap. Epic does not document how well a groom binding follows MetaHuman facial blendshapes versus joints. If roots lag on lip shapes, fall back to cards skinned to the face (section 5) for the moustache.

5. Cards for headsets

6. Wardrobe Item

  1. Create a MetaHuman Wardrobe Item referencing the beard's Groom Binding.
  2. In Creator, apply it in the beard (or mustache) slot. Set Melanin, Redness and Whiteness (grey) from the evidence sheet.
  3. Keep one Wardrobe Item per captain per date.

7. Practice exercise

Build two variants on one captain head: a 1840s clean-shaven face with short sideburns, and a 1860s chin curtain. Play the same take on both. Note where roots slip and which groups needed more density at kiosk distance.

8. Check before historian review

Sources