The Groom Tools are a collection of Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs) designed to support the creation of high-quality, strand-based hair grooms compatible with MetaHumans in Unreal Engine.
Built for use within Houdini, these tools provide a structured, procedural workflow for generating, styling, and exporting complex hairstyles — such as braids, buns, and cornrows — while supporting Unreal's Groom system attributes. The toolset is designed to enable the creation of complex and production-ready hairstyles using a robust and flexible grooming framework.
Two types of HDA are provided:
The Styling Tools are HDAs provided specifically to aid the creation of braid, bun, and cornrow hairstyles.
Opening the Houdini scene in a version prior to Houdini 21 (Houdini 20.5 ) will raise warnings mentioning vex strict variables on startup. However, these should not prevent you from working, and are due to Houdini 21 tools dependencies.
Next Steps
Parametric Hairstyle Generator
Houdini Parametric Hairstyle Generator tool for easier high quality hair creation.
Styling Tools
An overview of the styling tools used to create complex hairstyles.
Houdini Groom Exporter
Exporting a Houdini groom to Unreal Engine.