In the poem Bradamante is described as wearing white armor and a big red plume. Considering the aggresive top-down angle of the game, the red plume is one feature I really want to achieve. It’ll provide a lot of secondary movement and visual contrast against the background.
To achieve the plume I followed this tutorial:
With Bradamante’s helmet as the base for the hair strands. I made a vertex group with the top rim of the helmet and groomed the strands from there.
Once the strands had the shape I wanted, I exported the file as Alembic with a scale of 1. I’m omitting a lot of details, but if I basically followed the video step by step and changed only what I needed for my particular project.
In Unreal, I enabled the Groom and Alembic Groom Importer, just as the tutorial says. Once the engine has the plugins loaded, I imported the asset and adjusted the hair width, root scale and tip scale to get wide strands with thick roots and narrow tips.
I made a new Material with the Hair shading model, two sided, and marked the Used with Hair Strands option. Specular 0, Roughness 1, Base color with 5 red, 0 green, 0 blue, and a some emissiveness in red.
Final touches and it looks great!
Imported Bradamante’s Helmet, and adjusted it to the character’s head bone. Added the plume as child of the helmet.
And it worked like a charm!