I found a bit of information on Youtube via Epic's channel, but the issue I'm having is, they all seem to assume you have experience with grooming characters in Houdini already or that you've used the previous versions of the plugin. OR that you have no interest in "plain" hair and instead want to do braids, etc.

I'm just interested in creating custom facial hair and eyebrows for a specific metahuman, but so far I've found older videos and docs that aren't using the newer setup for Houdini 21 & Unreal 5.7 or they skip over the basics and jump right into doing really complex hair. Even the docs here seem to be missing a lot of information: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/metahuman/metahuman-for-houdini [dev.epicgames.com]

I'm working on a small project with some students and I'm trying to avoid bringing Maya into the mix, so any help/pointers would be greatly appreciated.

-Paul

Things get confusing because it seems that there's a difference between how the plugin worked under Houdini 20 and under 21.

I have tried to start with the basic groom starter kit, and while I'm able to create and export a groom as an alembic file, when I bring it in to Unreal I get a Groom Asset, which may or may not be different than a Groom in Unreal terms. However, again this is where things get confusing.

Matt Workman has a nice, simple video going from Houdini to Unreal with a basic groom, but he literally drags the groom from the content browser in Unreal to a slot in the Metahuman Creator in Unreal 5.7 and it just works. I have no luck there. However, other people explain that I have to bind the groom to a skeletal mesh, which I have tried and I can create the binding but the groom still can't be attached to my metahuman character.

I'm thrilled that I'm able to start talking about moving our students away from Maya in favor of Houdini, but documentation and examples are really important.

Paul

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/importing-grooms-into-unreal-engine?application_version=5.5 [dev.epicgames.com]

Its a Epic plugin so most of the documentation is on Epic and when importing a groom to UE its probably the same for all DCC

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/setting-up-bindings-for-grooms-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.5 [dev.epicgames.com]

i havent done it myself for long time.

The binding data is only used if the current level of detail (LOD) Binding Type is set to Skinning. This can be set up separately for each LOD in the Groom Asset Editor under the LOD panel settings. You can verify the current active binding type in the level by selecting Lit > Instances in the viewport menus and visualizing the Binding Type for each.