Every other groom on this site was fitted to one character. These go into a system: MetaHuman Creator lets a user reshape the head, and the style has to follow it. Each style also exists twice. The strand groom sets the look and is what a high-end machine renders up close, the cards are what everything else runs, and the engine swaps from one to the other as the camera pulls back. If the cards differ from the strands in silhouette, density or curl, the hair visibly changes at the swap, and a user sees it every time the camera moves.

We built the card version of every style, and for some of them the strand groom as well; the rest were matched to Epic's strands. Each started with LOD0 cards and textures, reviewed side by side with the strands, then four lower levels of detail, reviewed again as a set. Coverage maps were made at more than one density so the thin and thick parts of a style read the same on cards as they do in strands. The test Epic applied was the match rather than the look in isolation, which is harder because it has a right answer, and 76 rounds of feedback went into the library, most of them about a hairline, a curl or a density that had drifted from the strands.

A character groom is fitted to one sculpt. A MetaHuman style sits on whatever head a user builds, so the hairline has to hold as the head changes shape, and it has to hold at the extremes rather than on an average face, because the ends of the sliders are where people play.

A style can look right at every level in a still and fail anyway, because the fault only shows in motion: a pop when strands hand over to cards, or the outer edge of an eyebrow jumping between LOD2 and LOD4. So the reviews were animated comparisons with the strands alongside, and a level wasn't finished until the transition into it was clean.

In 2022 the base head the styles are fitted to was updated, and styles already built on the old head were refitted to the new one. In 2023 ten styles already in the library came back for another full round of feedback and LODs. A library outlives its first release, so the second and third passes are part of the job, and we have done them.

62 deliveries: 52 styles (27 cuts, 16 beards, moustaches and goatees, and 9 sets of eyebrows) plus 10 of those rebuilt in 2023, delivered as cards, textures and LODs. The work ran from August 2020 through 2023, with a last round of fixes in September 2024, and peaked at 12 people in a month.

Send us the strands. We'll build cards that match.