Unreal Engine 5: Bind Hair to Cloth Simulations

I've recently worked on a project where I had to create a cloth simulation for a fur Cape which also had to have some quite realistic room after looking around the documentation and threats for a while I realized there wasn't any specific documentation on binding a groom asset to a simulate a cloth asset which is why I want to make this short tutorial for this short demo I'm going to be using Unreal Engine 5.1.1 and optionally blender 3.5 in my case with Century to create the groom and Export it from now I won't be covering the blender part in this video but I'll learn some resources for both using their new hair Tools in blender 3.5 and also getting sent to Europe and running for the setup to work you have to enable groom the alamic groom importer as well as if you're using Century the python editor script plugin and the editor scripting utilities plugin next up in your project settings you want to enable support compute skin cache and if you're using Century you additionally want to enable the python remote execution option lastly in your editor settings you want to deactivate the option use less CPU in a background to speed up the import of larger assets and send to UE after enabling all of these plugins and settings you must restart your engine for the changes to check effect so here we are in unreal by the way it's totally fine to import your groom any which way so the standard way with just an Olympic room cache also works same goes for your cloth mesh you just have to make sure it's a skeletal mesh instead of a static mesh or anything else in unreal so first up you want to open the skeleton mesh editor by double clicking on your skeletal mesh we're going to apply some clothing data to it by right clicking it and then creating clothing data from section next up we're going to apply this clothing data as well by just right clicking it and applying so next you want to head over to the clothing section on the left panel if you don't have this open you can go to window and then open the clothing panel that way we're going to activate cloth paint and this is a really simple setup in this case so I just select a brush tool and a paint value of 100. increase the radius a little bit to 64 here and then just paint the lower two thirds of the plane that I imported after I'm done I'll switch tool to smooth and adjust the strength to B1 and hit smooth mesh a couple of times to avoid any hard or sharp transitions in my mesh I'll then deactivate cloth paint and save the mesh depending on how many vertices you have this will take longer or shorter in general I would recommend to keep vertices to a minimum for classroom that matches an Unreal Engine as otherwise the workflow might become super slow or just unstable altogether now we want to head over to our groom asset and double click that head over to the physics Tab and enable simulation here depending on your strand count this can also take a while or it can be super fast I opted for about 200k strands for this example here and this is also what I used in the project where I had to create the 4K so the compute for the simulation is almost done here and next after this we're going to head to the materials Tab and if you haven't already done so create a material slot for your grooming here and set up a little material what I mostly like to do is import a basic meta human into my project and grab the hair material from there or just migrate the asset over from another project after this is done we can hit save on the asset and close it to get back to a Content browser in a Content browser here we'll right click on our groom asset and hit create binding we will bind the mesh to our plain fbx that we imported earlier and just hit create you then get a little preview window of your binding asset this is all fine you don't have to change anything here save it and close it again and we're done setting up the groom asset it's now time to bring these two together which we can do by heading over to the skeletal mesh and creating a blueprint from it we right click it and then head to asset actions and create blueprint using this we can give it a name and set a location for it and after this it will just throw us right into the editor for the blueprint which we will just quickly compile and save before heading over to the skeletal mesh and adding a component We'll add a groom component and just name it fur and after this we will head over to the details panel and Link our groom asset in here and also link our binding asset in here which we created earlier after editing our groom asset now this will be sufficient that this was a standard skeletal mesh but for cloth simulation we need to do one more thing we're just heading over to skeletal mesh and searching for skin when you search your skin you find skin cache usage and you need to create a new array element here we then select enabled for this array element and as I said we can now compile and save our blueprint and then head back to the content browser from here we'll just head over to the blueprints folder which got created when we created our blueprint and then grab the blueprint and drag it into this level zero out of location and rotated towards the camera so next up we're going to replace actors panel and we're searching for wind and we grab the wind directional source to just preview our cloth animation we set the strength and the speed both to 5 and keep in mind that the gust amount and the radius don't currently work with the chaos cloth solver which unreals using sends Unreal Engine 5. when we now press simulate or hit alt s on our keyboard we can see that our setup works it's really great that unreal supports these kind of complex simulation interactions although you have to keep in mind that the usual limitations of these simulations and of Groom physics especially apply to name just one of them at the moment you can't use temporal samples when rendering in a movie render queue and overwriting the anti-aliasing method this actually goes for all simulated components so it's best to stick with special samples if your scene contains cloth groom assets and the likes also you have to keep stability in performance in mind in my use case which was a cinematic it's fine to use very high resolution settings for Grooms and vertex counts that might not be Rock Solid however if you're working on a large production or if you're shipping a game I wouldn't recommend using large Grooms or high detail cloths Australian together like this especially if collisions are involved too for this particular setup I haven't tested collisions all too much but the same parameters that apply for cloth usually should apply here to LA sleep if you have any questions or recommendations on how to make the saddle even better feel free to put them in the comments section thanks all for watching

Channel: h

Views: 19,056

Keywords: unreal, engine, unreal engine, cgi, vfx, cloth simulation, cloth, simulation, groom asset, hair asset, hair, groom binding, bind, binding asset, interaction, solver, 3D, 3D art, animation, cinematic, sequencer, unreal engine 5, art, digital art, blueprints, coding, mesh, 3d mesh, game engine, realtime, real time

Id: mj6P1shl28c

Length: 5min 55sec (355 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023