In this tutorial, we will learn how to create realistic hair in Unreal Engine 5. In this new tutorial released by Jason Hill, we will see how to export grooming, made in Maya with the XGen to Unreal Engine plugin.

How to create realistic hair in Unreal Engine?

In the tutorial we will see the process of importing hair from Maya to Unreal Engine, we will see how to enable the Groom Importer plugin in the UE for rendering and grooming simulation, aiming to create very realistic hair with real-time rendering simulations.

Furthermore, you can also export the hair system from Maya to an alembic file and import it into Unreal by enabling the “Alembic Groom Importer” plugin (01:15 Enable Plugins).

The first step is to convert the XGen hair generated in Maya into an interactive groom to export it as a cache alambic in Unreal Engine, (02:00 Exporting Hair from Maya).

A crucial part is in the imports of the grooming option in Unreal Engine, which recognizes when importing the hair file from Maya, once imported you can see, that there is a new source resource in the directory in UE and therefore it is automatically you can import it as a groom file, just hit import all, and insert it into the 3d scene.

Once the hair is imported into the scene Jason shows us how to create the correct hair material in Unreal Engine Tutorial (12:57 Creating a Hair Material).

How to create realistic Hair Material for MetaHuman Characters?

Also in the tutorial, we can see how to use hair material to create a realistic hair set up in Unreal Engine on the Digital Humans of MetaHuman Creator characters.  (12:57 Creating a Hair Material) Enjoy it!

How to create realistic hair in Unreal Engine Tutorial

Tasks in this Tutorial:
01:15 Enable Plugins
02:00 Exporting Hair from Maya
06:00 Importing into Unreal Engine
08:31 Editing Hair Settings
11:27 Squarespace
12:57 Creating a Hair Material
24:36 Conclusion