Generating Groom Textures

A Groom asset includes added functionality to create their textures based on the strands data in your groom. You can create Follicle and Strands textures to use with your groom. This is important for creating the groom's level of detail (LOD) meshes. Follicle textures create a mask for a skeletal mesh to better blend hair with its surface. Strands textures create multiple textures from projected strands data onto meshes, which is useful for creating card and hair helmet meshes.

Creating Groom Textures In-Editor

To create a Follicle or Strands texture:

1. Locate your Groom asset in the Content Browser.
2. Right-click on the Groom asset to open its Context Menu.
3. At the top of the menu, select Create Follicle Texture or Create Strands Textures.
4. Optionally, you can configure settings in either dialog or leave them as-is.
5. Click Create to generate the textures.

Depending on your selected option, you'll see one of the following dialogs to create either a follicle or strands texture. Generated textures are saved in the same location as the grooms they generate from.

Follicle Texture

A Follicle texture contains a small distance field of the hair roots that make up your groom. This allows some effects within the shaders of the underlying surface materials to be captured from a skeletal mesh.

When creating a Follicle texture:

• The color channels store texture information.
• You can choose multiple grooms to use with the generated texture.

You can apply grooms individually to different color channels or have them be in the same color channel, meaning you don't need each groom to have a follicle texture mask.

The example follicle textures below use the default "Hudson" MetaHuman character that uses three separate grooms: one for hair, one for eyelashes, and one for mustache and stubble. The image shows three follicle texture masks created individually for the three separate grooms on the left. On the right, if selecting these three grooms together and generating a follicle texture, they are combined and can have each groom's texture mask applied to a different color channel or into the same color channel. This shows them packed into separate color channels using the red, green, and blue channels.

This is an example of how you can combine several grooms follicle textures into a single texture mask using the Create Follicle Texture workflow..

You can find the following properties in the Groom Follicle Mask Options dialog:

Strands Textures

The Strands textures include multiple textures generated from your groom using a specified static or skeletal mesh. The Groom Strands Texture Options output textures for Depth, Coverage, Tangent, Attributes, and Material by default.

Examples of generated Strands textures. Textures from left to right: Depth, Coverage, Tangent, Attributes, Material.

These generated textures can be used on grooms made of cards and grooms using hair "helmets" for the highest detail levels but lowest geometric quality. Below is an example showing (from left to right) the strands groom, cards grooms, and mesh hair "helmet" groom. Strands and Cards provide the highest quality for viewing up close to mid-range, while the hair helmet is ideal when the character is much farther from the player camera.

The following properties are found in the Groom Strands Texture Options dialog: