How to Create Custom Metahuman Hair

tired of the same metahuman default hair epic want to make custom unreal hair for your character look no further than this tutorial yeah welcome to the prompt News Channel today I'm going to be showing you how to create and customize metahuman hair using blender zero plugins and absolutely free software we are going to be going through an entire step bystep process where you're going to create your first luscious long hair and in the process of doing that you'll learn the skills that you will need to create your own custom hair whether that's the longest mustache in the world the bushiest eyebrows or shaved back and sides if you want to grab these blender files you can head to my Patron in the description before we get on with the tutorial I'm going to assume a couple of things that you've already got Unreal Engine installed on your PC you got the metahuman plug-in also installed and that you've got quicko bridge if you don't have any of those things do not worry I've got a getting started guide down in the descript description so you can get up to speed so you can get into this tutorial without D free grab your shoes we're going home if you don't already have a metahuman you're going to do this hair for you can create one in the metahuman Creator if you don't know metahuman Creator is a browser based app where you can create custom metahuman albeit quite limited you can quickly put together a metahuman character if you go to my metahuman on top left that will automatically save your metahuman and we're going to be bringing that down in quickel Bridge in one moment we're now going to jump into the epics games launcher and then go up to the top tab Marketplace and search for metum and find metahuman lighting this is a free lighting rig that we can use just to speed things up so click on download and then click on create project and then go up to launch and then find that project and open that project from there we're now going to bring our metum down from where we've created it in the metahuman Creator so if you go to windows then then to quickel Bridge and just ensure that you're logged into the quickel bridge app because this connects to your metahuman Creator once you're logged in on the left hand side go to my metahumans and you should see your metahuman there and then click on your metahumans card and then down here click on download once it's downloaded just click add and that's going to add it to the content draw within your project that you have open you can now close the quicks Bridge window and within Unreal Engine if you come down to your content draw in the bottom left hand corner and click on the metahumans folder your characters folder should now be in there if you click on your characters folder then within there you'll see BP underscore your character's name just left click and drag that anywhere in your project now to get your character to the dead center just click on this button here and this will Zero out all your Transformations the reason why I left my character's hair on was to actually just demonstrate how to delete it in case you've got a character already with hair so navigate up to your outliner and then go to bpor character's name and then edit BP from the top left window if you come down if you just find hair and hit delete on the keyboard now all you need to do is press compile and save and close that window so now we're going to export the head mesh to take into blender you can do the same with the body mesh as well it's exactly the same procedure all you need to do is find your character's face folder and then go in here you'll see your character's name underscore face mesh double left click the face mesh to enter its properties and all you need to do is click on make static mesh the reason why I want you to do this because it gets rid of all the bones so you don't need to delete them in blender now if you just save that character's face mesh I'm just saving it in the same face folder where the face mesh originally is I'm just going to call it undor export okay once you've saved that just close that window go back to your content drawer and it should be there right click on your static mesh export and then go to asset actions and Export find a suitable location to save and hit save and then from the export panel just uncheck level of details because we don't want to bring in all the LOD meshes we just want one mesh everything else we keep the same and click on export okay cool we're done with unreal for the moment so jump into blender just going to select everything in the scene and hit delete we're now going to import that metahuman head mesh so go to file import and down to fbx we going to locate that static mesh undor export and just uncheck animation and click on import I'm just going to rename my head mess click on it and crl c and crl V to make a copy and I'm just going to call that scalp we now want to separate the scalp from the the face because we're going to be emitting the hair just from the scalp with our characters head selected going to hit three on the number keypad this will put you in the side view viewport and then go to object mode edit mode and then from The Tweak tool select select lasso and we're going to make sure X symmetry is switched on as well as x-ray toggle mode is switched on here and we are going to be selecting the scalp here to make it slightly easier you might want to hit a on the keyboard which will select your entire head and press Alt J on the keyboard which will remove the vertices that will make the selection a little bit easier for you when you're selecting this area do not worry it does not have to be a perfectly selected area just the area where you want the hair to be emitted from if you hit control and plus or minus on the keypad you can increase or decrease the selection area just ensure scalp is selected and hit p on the keyboard from the popup menu select selection and you'll see it has now created a separate scalp so if you switch off these models you'll see it's now separated into its own mesh we can click on the original scalp here and just hit delete we don't need that anymore because we've got the separated mesh here and we're just going to just take the 00001 off there you probably want to keep the original head mesh because you can use it as a guide particularly for longer hairstyle so you can drape it over the shoulders or down the back if you select the scalp and go to the material properties down here you'll see that we've brought in the unreal materials we can simply hit this minus button to delete those we're going to add our new material here by clicking the new button and I'm just going to pick a yellow I'm then going to go to the viewport shading and switch there so we can see where our hairline is defined with your scalp selected go to object mode edit mode press a on the keyboard to select all the mesh and then press U on the keyboard and select unwrap so I'm going to click on scalp and press shift and a and from the popup menu select curves and then empty hair now you can see if you expand your scalp you have this curves modifier if you go to object mode you'll see now you've got sculpt mode this is where all your hair tools will be contained click on the add hair tool and then up here just ensure projected is selected and set the count up here to One Hit N on the keyboard and select the tools tab this activates your hair tools dialogue left click anywhere on the scalp to place your first hair guide increasing the hair count means you are increasing the amount of hair guides you place per click if you press the X up here it will enable the Symmetry with press on the scalp Collision button this will stop the hair colliding or intersecting with your scalp mesh in the active tool change the points per curve depending on your hair style so if it's short you want to use between 8 and 10 points per curve for longer Styles you want to go between 15 and 20 points per curve the curve length is the length of your hair so how long it is this is already set to what I want I'm going for midlength hair start placing the hair guides by simply left clicking on the hair scalp I like to break my hair down into sections so you can see here with the image I've got three section to the hair and the first section is this back section which we're going to be working on it's completely up to you but I find this for me the easiest way to work select the hair coat and switch to projected at the top simply brush the hair to the back of the scalp and then brush it down to the back of the back when combing hair remember to move round and switch perspectives because this will help you move the hair guides into the final position you can use the smooth tool which will smooth out the geometry of the hair to give you an overall smoother look take your time combing the hair guides into the position you want use your reference and relax into it I've done this quite a few times and also sped up this tutorial so take your time at this stage and your hair will look better for it we're now going to activate the Geon noes modifier panel so come down to the bottom left where you've got this clock and select asset browser from the popup menu I'm just going to expand my window up and Select Hair just to ensure your curves is selected and select the modifier properties the first hair modifier I'm going to be using is the interpolate hair I just left click and drag it onto the hair this has now added the interpolate hair to our modifier step so go to surface and select scalp go to distance to hair guides and increase this by increasing this this is actually decreasing the distance of each of your hair groups between your hair guides navigate to your render properties and expand curves from here select the strip and then put in the additional subdivision fre in the modifier properties and under the interpretate hair modifier I'm going to increase the density to 50,000 play around I go between 50,000 and 100,000 for large volume areas of the hair if you're finding your scalp is patchy you can go back to add hair select curve shape and check length shape and point count with those settings now every time you click and place a hair guide it's going to copy the selected length shape and direction of the hair besides it this technique works really well on the center parting of the hair if it's looking a little bit sparse using the paint selection to you can select individual hair guides you can use different tools on this selection and you can add texture which overall will add more realism to your hairstyle go up to select to invert the selection or press all which will select all the hair guides or none which will clear the selection completely I'm going to move on to the second section which is the front left of the hair I'm going to click on object mode or press tab ensure the scalp mesh is selected I press shift and a curves and a empty hair I'm going to rename this curves uncore left just so I know which section I'm working on hit Tab and go to sculpt mode we are repeating the same Technique we learned in doing the back of the hair ensure that you add more hair guides to the hairline as well as the center parting because your hair will be sparse here so add more here using the comb tool just brush this section into place again take your time when doing this come back into object mode and what you want to do is Select curves underscore back or wherever your first section was and then shift select the curves left which is your new section come down to the modifier properties under interpretate hair modifier from the drop- down arrow here select copy to selected as you can see it's copied the modifier and all its settings to the other section so that's a quick way of copying and pasting modifiers so you can jump back into sculpt mode and refine the sections of your hair to your design desire so we're now going to create the last section so you should know what we do by now we go into object mode shift and a curves empty hair we're just repeating everything we have done in the previous hair sections I just want to remind you also to add more hair guides to The Parting and the hairline I've just spreed up the section but I'm just using the comb tool to create those large volume waves in the hair and the paint selection to divide off sections of hair and move them again to just make the hair look a bit more natural next we're going to be adding some more hair modifiers to make the hair look more realistic I'm going to be using the clump hair curves so select that and drag that onto your hair guides under the clump hair modifiers uncheck existing hair guide maps and then go to the guide distance increasing this value you can see the hair clumps into sections ending at the tip I'm just going to copy this modifier onto the other curve sections if you want curly hair simply add the curl hair curves onto your hair modifier stack here so the hair guide distance I'm going to set at free I'm going to uncheck existing guide map I'm going to come down to frequency which is how often the hair curl appears or happens and then I'm going to come to radius which is the size of the curls increasing this value will give you larger curls if you don't want the curls starting from the root you can go to curl start and increase this value which will make the hair Cur start further down I would like to urge you to experiment with different modifiers as well on top of the stack I'm going to add the Friz hair curves to the stack here and then increase the distance as well and you can see that it just makes the hair a little bit more frizzy if I come further up the stack to the clump setting and then reduce the hair masks down to zero and you can see it's effect on the curl so you can really play around with these Geo nodes these modifiers to really get the effect that you're you're looking for you can also add the braid hair curves to the modifier stack and change the values to where you desired the braids are following the hair guides so if you increase or decrease or move the hair guides the braids will move with those if you're looking at doing mustaches beards eyebrows that sort of thing all you need to do is select the face mesh and then do shift a curves and then empty hair curves exactly the same procedure as we did for the hair just remember to reduce the curve length of the length of the hair to be a lot shorter I'm going to be uploading a bunch of blender hairstyles onto my Patron so you can go and join and download that if you want the resource files it's a good time to now save your project as we're going to be collapsing some of these modifiers select a curved section of your hair mine's going to be curves right go to the modify panel from the drop down select apply repeat this on every single modifier in the stack and then move on to the next curve section and apply those modifiers make sure that you have collapsed all these and applied before moving to the next stage shift select all your curve sections go up to objects here convert and particle system go up to under your scalp mesh and select modifiers and then click on your particle properties you can see here you should have your free hair sections up at the top and come down and expand viewport display and render I'm going to uncheck show emitter in both both of these and under steps and strand steps we're going to increase that to seven scroll up to the top of this panel and then click your next section which is going to repeat the same steps here I'm going to increase the steps and then increase the Strand steps in a nutshell what you have done here is interpolated the hair so you've increased the amount of steps on the hair so it's not segmented it's nice and smooth when you bring it into unreal the emitter is your scalp so essentially you're just turning it off which means you're not bringing it into unreal okay let's export this so these next settings have to be exact otherwise you're going to get an import error so make sure that you click on the scalp mesh yes that's the scalp top bit here go to file then export and then Olympic give your hair groom a nice name and then on the right hand side this is vital you get this right go to scale and set this to 100 under end set this to one select select objects and visible objects and use settings viewport uncheck everything under object options exporters Olympic jump back into Unreal Engine and from your content draw go to your metahumans find your characters folder go to female hair then hair and this is where we're going to import your hair groom into right click into any empty space in the content draw and go up to import two at the top select your Olympic file that you exported from blender the extension will be ABC if successful you'll get the groom import options if for any reason your hair Imports on the wrong mirror axle or on the wrong rotation you can change the conversion units here click on import and your hair groom will be imported into your content drawer not into the scene so just click on your hair groom and drag it out onto the scene click on this icon next to transform and this will Zero out your hair groom which means it will position it into the center of your scene in your content browser double left click onto your hair groom that you've just imported to enter its options if for any reason your dialogue is not displaying the same tabs as mine just go up to Windows and check those on the first tab we're going to visit is the interpolation tab so click on that and then go to the top one which is the curve dissemination now I'm going to bring this down between 0.2 and 0.3 and again this will help with the interpolation of the hair curve AKA just making it smoother do not worry about the hair looking fine or thin because we're going to adjust that now so go up to the strands Tab and under hair root scale increase that to two if for any reason your roots still look a little bit sparse go back to your interpolation your curve dissemination and bump that up to 0.3 lastly under the hair strands tab go to hair tip scale and reduce that down to 0.001 go to the physics Tab and we're going to enable physics simulation this will enable Environmental phys scts to your hair as well as your character's movements which makes it quite fun when your character moves the hair moves naturally now if you find that the hair is being pulled down a little bit too much with the gravity under Gravity Vector in the last column just make this minus 400 minus 500 whatever suits your hairstyle have a play around you can see the effects in the preview window here we're now going to add our hair color so go to the materials Tab and press the plus icon on the material slots and then from the the drop- down window type in mi iore hair and you'll see from the drop- down list you've got this material instance this is the material instances that you imported from the original Mage human we're going to be using this hair material as our template so we don't actually have to build from scratch we can just adjust this hair template to be exactly what we want if you click on the magnifying symbol in the middle here it will take you in the content to where that material is living double click the miore hair to get into its properties adjusting the daap value will adjust the different Hues in the hair color so you can get a different hair color completely from just going up and down this value increasing the hair manoline value will increase the hair Darkness the more manoline the darker the hair increasing the value in the hair redness will increase the warmth in the hair color the hair roughness is the shininess so increasing this actually makes it more matte decreasing this makes it more shiny so just be careful with this one cuz the hair can look quite plastic roughness variation will variate the shine throughout the hair and then specular will give the glossy look increasing this will make the areas that are glossy larger decreasing it will make the glossy areas smaller if you scroll down this panel you'll find hair dye if you check that you can use the color wheel and the levels here to adjust the color vibrancy so if you're looking for a real Extreme color I suggest you use the hair dye setting once you're happy with the settings just click the save icon and just close these windows next we're going to be attaching the hair to the metum currently it is not attached and in unreal world we call attaching binding right click on your groom asset and from the popup menu select create binding from here under green binding type select skeletal mesh and then the target skeletal mesh it's going to be your face mesh select this and click on create this window will automatically pop up just click on Save and close the window you'll see here your bind asset has been created in your content drawer Now navigate up to your outliner and your bpor character or whatever your characters name is click on edit BP within the blueprint screen on the left hand side click the add button within the search panel here just type in groom and from the drop down List It prents click on groom you can rename this groom asset to whatever you want I'm just going to call mine new hair and I'm going to drag it down underneath my face hierarchy on the right hand side of the screen under the groom and groom asset go to drop- down window select the imported groom asset next from The Binding asset drop down window you want to select your binding asset that we just created click on compile on the top left and then click save and then close this window if you move your character around you will see that the hair is now attached to your metahuman and you have physics which means the hair will move around with a car in its environment you'll also probably notice you do have a random hair there as well that we want to delete from the scene so go to your outliner click on your hair groom and hit delete on the keyboard I have avoided using the nod graph editor because I want you to get into using the modifiers then you can get into the semantics of learning the node based graph editor and creating your own node based modifiers so we can do that in another video but I just wanted to make you feel comfortable with the entire process because there is nothing worse than getting frustrated uh with complicated procedures uh learning the basics I think is the best way to go forward and achieving and making something for your character and then going from there like every first Pancake your first hairstyle for your M human might not be the best but you are learning and that is what matters once you created that and worked out the workflow you can then go in from there and start creating all the different styles and as always I've written up this tutorial on the prompt muse.com website also also also before you go I know this is a bit of a long outro but if you could at me at prom Muse with what you've created your different hairstyles I would love to see them so that's at prompt Muse on every social media apart from Tik Tok because I deleted it with all that said thank you so much and until next time that will do it bye-bye

Channel: Prompt Muse

Views: 29,223

Keywords: #blendertutorial, #custommetahuman, blenderhair, #metahuman

Id: l0PiYCDmjBk

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024