xGen to UnrealEngine Tool - Alembic Export Script for Maya
Scripts automates the exporting process of hair created with xGen Maya to UnrelEngine5 (and UE4).
Works with Maya 2022, 2023.
Scripts speeds up the steps described by Epic’s Documentation of how to export xGen hair for UE5 in Alembic file https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-US/xgen-guidelines-for-hair-creation-in-unreal-engine/
How it works
The manual way of exporting Alembic Hair for UnrealEngine suggests converting your xGen groom into Interactive Groom Splines, then exporting them as NURB Curves and bringing back to Maya to create specific attributes for the final Alembic Export. These attributes contain information about hair thickness, UVs, groups and guides data for simulation, and sometimes color information.
Epic shares individual scripts to use in Maya to assign all these attributes (Read more here).
The main problem with doing this manually is that it takes a lot of time. And not talking about that when your groom consists of thousands of curves (or hair splines) Maya can be very slow processing them.
So my script sometimes saves me a day of work on each finished metahumans groom asset for my clients.
Click Image to Enlarge
Video Tutorial:
Check the video below where I'll be showing you how to use my script to export custom made Metahuman hair made in XGen Maya to Unreal Engine 5.
I'll cover topics such as setting up your scene in Maya, installing the scrip, and exporting your hair to Unreal Engine 5.
Next, I'll show you how to import your hair into Unreal Engine 5 and give you some tips on how to optimize your hair for real-time performance in Unreal Engine 5