Braids Haircut for UE4 with nHair and xGen

Recently (UE4.25) Unreal Engine added the possibility to use alembic hair. It’s a revolutionary feature, still beta, but designated to radically change the procedure of creating characters to use with the engine. Thanks to the fact that finally Autodesk offers Maya Indie also in my country, I was able to test this beautiful new feature that Epic has added to its engine.

This little tutorial is about how to create a braid in Maya using nHair and xGen plugins. All I did was to follow this Daryl Obert’s video tutorial and adapt it to my needs. I’m writing this blog post essentially to memorize what I have learned, as I’m a total noob in the matter of creating hair with Maya.

Continue reading “Braids Haircut for UE4 with nHair and xGen”

Adding Details to the Scene

I’ve started adding a few details to the scene, in order to make the environment more lively. I had to model a few new meshes and make some textures. My friend did the sewers like decals. I still want to add some text on the banners and make some new curtains (Noren) for more variety.

UE4: Renaming and moving assets

We almost finished a reorganization of a project containing about 2000 uassets. Moving, renaming, removing unused ones, this kind of stuff. Few notes for memory.

  • Backup intermediary results.
  • When renaming stuff it’s better to run fixup redirectors time to time (often).
  • When moving folders fixup redirectors is mandatory, moving twice or moving and renaming can break things.
  • Some things are not properly marked dirty, so you have to save them even there is no little “*” on them. Composite textures are one of them. We ended up saving textures by hand every time.
  • Also, better run a save on things you changed (right-click -> save) and recompile blueprints.
  • There are mass renaming plugins on the marketplace, like MORT
  • Bonus: windows command that recursively prints all file paths in a folder: dir /b /s /a:-D

Sake Bottles

I’ve remade the sake bottles in order to make them to look more Japanese (the bottles I did a couple years ago were meant for another  project and looked too much like European wine imho, even with the Japanese stickers I added). So I made some new model, some new stickers and worked on the glass shader to make the material to look more realistic. Here the result: