Hair and Beards: Helmet Hair
Helmet Hair System
Helmet hair refers to a more optimised hairstyle made specifically to fit under various pieces of headwear to give the impression that the character has a natural hairstyle underneath. It is not meant to be used on its own.
There are 2 headwear types where this system is used: Type A and Type C.
Hair
Helmet hairstyles do not follow the normal hair system where they can be shared between genders/races. This is because automatically snapped hair does not always fit correctly below a manually snapped helmet.
We therefore need to manually snap each helmet hairstyle to all available races, and make sure they work with the headwear limitations. We have provided helmet hair reference meshes for male and female humans here: REF_Helmet_Hair.fbx
Importing helmet hair follows more or less the same steps at importing a regular hairstyle. You need to make sure that the helmet hair VisualResource has a material, Hair Preset Resource ID, and Scalp Material ID assigned. Also remember to add Hair to the Tags and fill in the Hair Length that’s closest to your hairstyle.
Hair Length has long and short variations across 5 different styles:
- Afro
- Curly
- Dreadlocks
- Straight
- Wavy
Finally, set the Slot ID to HelmetHair.
Adding Headwear
During the modelling process for helmets, the helmet hair limits need to be kept in mind.
Helmets need to be larger than the reference volume, and have a similar shape to the reference. Below are some examples of the two different helmet types.
When integrating headwear into the engine, the Slot ID should be Headwear. See the Equipment System section in the Adding Armour guide for more details on setting up the root template for your new headwear.
When editing your root template’s Equipment Data, you'll need to fill in the different hair variations (in the green box below) with the helmet hair you want to use for it. If you have Type A headwear, you should use Type A helmet hair, and if you have Type C headwear, you should use Type C helmet hair. You will need to do this for every tab (Human Male, Human Female, etc.).
ⓘ If you don’t fill these in, there will be no hair shown when the headwear is worn.
Tags
There are different tags you can add to a piece of headwear or hairstyle:
- Hair should get assigned to actual hair meshes, not headwear!
- Never Hide Hair is used for circlets, crowns and masks, as well as anything else that should not automatically hide the hair or use helmet hair.
- Hide Ears makes the ear meshes (and any earrings) invisible when the headwear is equipped.
- Hide Beard hides the beard when the headwear is equipped. Use this when the chin or a large area of the chin gets covered by the headwear, as with the Grymskull Helm, for example. Don’t forget to add this tag to female races as well, since female characters can also have beards.
With that, you should be set to create helmet hair!
