How to Design and Render Realistic Hair Using XGen and Unreal Engine

Rishabh Shrimali talked about how he created the Low Bun project, explaining how he made the blockout to better understand the flow, volume, forms, and silhouette in 3D, and detailing how he extracted curves from the sculpt to optimize the workflow.

Introduction

I'm Rishabh Shrimali, Lead Hair and Grooming Artist with 5 years of experience crafting high-quality, realistic hair, fur, and feather grooms for AAA games. Over the years, I've contributed to multiple shipped titles, along with several unannounced projects currently in development, delivering production-ready grooms focused on realism, performance, and strong visual appeal.

Here are my ArtStation profile and LinkedIn.

This asset started as a personal XGen practice project to advance my grooming skills. I chose this concept because it challenged me to explore new techniques and improve my understanding of realistic hair creation.

Workflow - Low Bun XGen Groom

To create this hairstyle, I used ZBrush, Maya XGen, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine 5.6.

I followed a simple grooming workflow:

Chose a main concept for the hairstyle.
Collected references based on the chosen concept to better understand the style, flow, volume, and overall look.
After completing the reference pack, I created a hair blockout to better understand the flow, volume, forms, and silhouette in 3D.

Once the blockout was completed, I moved to the Maya XGen stage. Before starting the groom, I planned how many descriptions and collections would be required for the hairstyle.
After the planning, I extracted curves from the sculpt (with the help of the Grooming tool) to speed up the guide creation process.

I first created a strand with very basic modifiers applied to understand the flow and proportions (which you can treat as the base groom).
After finalizing the base groom, I started adding more modifiers and secondary details.

Final Steps

Once the modifiers were applied, I exported the Alembic cache to preview the hair inside Unreal Engine. Lighting and shading were also done in Unreal Engine during this stage.
After reviewing the groom in Unreal Engine, I made the final adjustments and added flyaways back in XGen.
The last step covered rendering, look development, and post-production for the final presentation.