# Grooms for MetaHuman — Considerations Hair, beards, eyebrows, eyelashes and peach fuzz. Hair is the part of a digital human that most often looks wrong, and period hairstyles are rarely in the MetaHuman library. ## Two outputs per groom | Output | Where it runs | How | |---|---|---| | **Strands** | Kiosk (Cine assembly), PC-VR | Alembic groom with required attributes, bound to the MetaHuman | | **Hair cards** | Quest, Vive standalone, phones (Optimized) | Unreal **Hair Card Generator** (also available in Dataflow) from the strand groom, with generated groom textures | ## Authoring options | DCC | Route | Notes | |---|---|---| | **Maya XGen** | MetaHuman **Groom Starter Kit** (Maya project) → **Groom Exporter** (MetaHuman for Maya) → Alembic | Epic's documented path; includes density map, noise, cut modifiers and width ramps | | **Blender** (hair curves) | Alembic export with the required attributes | Community starter kits and tutorials exist (see [[Grooms — Tutorials]]) | | **Houdini** | Groom tools → Alembic | Strongest for complex styles; needs a Houdini artist | ## Required groom attributes (Unreal) `groom_width` · `groom_rootuv` · `groom_group_id` · `groom_id` · `groom_guides` Then create a **Groom Binding** to the MetaHuman skeletal mesh (one per body/head variant). ## Steps 1. Period reference: portraits, photographs, hair-dressing manuals of the year. 2. Scalp and hairline from the sculpt; separate groups (hair, bun, brows, lashes, fuzz). 3. Guides → interpolated hair; clumping, frizz and flyaways (period hair was not blow-dried). 4. Export Alembic with attributes; import to Unreal; bind. 5. Tune materials (melanin, redness, roughness); physics only where hair moves. 6. Generate **cards** and groom textures for the Optimized assembly; check on Quest. 7. Historian and costume sign-off. ## Considerations for historical characters - **Period accuracy beats glamour.** 1840s women's hair: center part, smooth over the ears, bun or coil at the back; caps indoors for Quaker women. Beards and sideburns follow the decade. - **Under-groom rather than over-groom.** Modern volume and shine read as anachronistic. - **Performance.** Strand hair is expensive; one character with strands on an RTX 5080 kiosk is fine; two characters may need a 5090 or cards for the second. - **Caps and bonnets** are often cloth, not hair: model them in Marvelous Designer and hide hair beneath. - **Budget time.** Grooms are where cheap builds fail; plan 3–6 weeks per figure for a contract groom artist. **Owner:** groom artist. Tutorials: [[Grooms — Tutorials]] Sources: [[Sources — 2026-09-19]]