Skip to content

The Universal Groom System

Groom once. Use it everywhere.

Hair, fur, feathers and scales, groomed in Maya or the GroomLab app and identical in Arnold, Unreal and Unity.

Get GroomLabLearn more

Nick Rutlinh Created in GroomLab

Works with

  • Maya 2022
  • Arnold
  • Unreal Engine
  • Unity
  • glTF
  • Alembic
  • USD

Where it runs

One groom. Every app. The same hair.

A GroomLab groom isn't millions of baked hairs. It's the recipe: your guides, your node graph and your painted maps, in one small file. Open it in Maya, in GroomLab's own app or on a render farm, and the same core rebuilds the same hair, strand for strand.

  • Identical everywhere

    One engine rebuilds the groom in every app, so what you groom is what renders, strand for strand.

  • Tiny files

    A full head of hair travels as a few megabytes, not gigabytes of baked curves.

  • Always editable

    Nothing is baked until you export, so any app can open the groom and keep grooming.

wolf.groom

Guides, node graph and painted maps

  • Maya
  • GroomLab app (soon)
  • Render farm
  • Unreal and Unity

Everything a groom needs. Nothing it doesn't.

Groom by hand

Brush the guides. The hair follows.

Place and draw guides on the scalp, then generate children inside each guide's tube. Every stroke is one undo step, and strands update as you work.

Learn more about groom by hand
Guides drawn over a groom in Maya's viewport, colored by hierarchy level
The Groom Tools panel with its brushes

Node graph

Style with a node graph.

Clumps, curls, frizz and braids are nodes you wire together. A full look graph over 100k strands evaluates in under 0.1 s, so sliders feel live.

Learn more about node graph
The GroomLab Graph Editor with a look built from nodes

Paint anything

Paint any parameter.

Right-click a parameter and paint it: gray or color, on the guides, the scalp or a texture. Pack four masks in one RGBA map and feed each channel to a different node.

Learn more about paint anything
Painting a map on the scalp in GroomLab's Paint tab

Game-ready cards

From groom to game engine.

A Cards node turns the groom into cards that follow its clumps, with color, coverage, direction and AO baked from its own strands. Export to Unreal, Unity or glTF, or send the strands themselves.

Learn more about game export

Performance

Half a million strands. Measured against XGen.

GroomLab and Maya's XGen Interactive Grooming, side by side on the same scalp and machine at 500,000 strands.

  • New groom to first drawn frame26× faster
    XGen
    12.6 s
    GroomLab
    0.49 s
  • Saved scene (.mb)51× smaller
    XGen
    114 MB
    GroomLab
    2.23 MB
  • Animated scalp, evaluation per frame15× faster
    XGen
    414 ms
    GroomLab, Follow Scalp
    28 ms
  • Dragging the clump slider, to redrawn frame28× faster
    XGen
    367 ms
    GroomLab, GPU preview
    13.3 ms

Maya 2022, Windows 11; AMD Threadripper PRO 5945WX (12 cores), 128 GB RAM, RTX 3090. The same 17k-triangle head-sized scalp, strands 15 cm long with 16 points each, clumping and noise on both (GroomLab adds a Curl), every strand shown in the viewport. Medians of 5 runs for XGen and 3 for GroomLab, each measurement in a fresh Maya.

Every number, and how to run it yourself

Under the hood

Built for groom artists. Down to the strand.

A graph you can read node by node, maps on the parameters that matter, and a groom that evaluates the same from the viewport to the farm.

GroomLab's nodes: Scalp, Guides, ImportCurves, ColliderMesh, Scatter, Interpolate, Cull, Length, Width, Resample, Comb, Lift, Flow, Part, Smooth, BlendNeighbors, Collide, RestoreLength, AutoClump, Clump, Twist, Braid, Noise, Curl, Flyaway, Tangle, Instance, Wind, Jiggle, HairColor, Propagate, Split, ToGuides, ToStrands, Map, Expression, Control, Field, FieldNoise, FieldRemap, FieldCombine, Curve, Attribute, Merge, Switch, Blend, Output, Cards.

Every node, explained
A procedural for the farm
Exported .ass files hold a small procedural that grows the groom at render time, into aiStandardHair with per-strand melanin. Render LOD thins crowds and wide shots.
Same groom, every machine
Randomness is seeded from strand IDs, so the viewport, the farm, one thread or thirty-two all evaluate every frame the same.
Maps and keys on the parameters
Drive a value from a texture, a color set, a strand attribute or an expression, or key it in place: press S over a field and it becomes Maya animation.
Scripted end to end
Every step in the UI has a Python call, and groomlab-cli evaluates groom files headless for farms and other hosts.
make_groom.py
import groomlabfrom groomlab import graphgroom = groomlab.create_groom("head")model = graph.GraphModel.from_groom(groom)model.add_node("Curl", name="curl")model.insert_between("length", "width", "curl")model.set_param("curl", "radius", 0.08)model.save(groom)   # undoablegroomlab.export_alembic(groom, "C:/cache/groom.abc",                        start=1, end=48)
The Python API

Start grooming.

  1. Install

    Unzip, then drag install.mel onto the Maya viewport.

  2. Groom

    Create a groom from a mesh, brush the guides and build the look.

  3. Export

    Render in Arnold, or send cards and strands to your engine.

Get it on GumroadGet it on ArtStation

Maya 2022 on Windows (64-bit) Arnold renders need MtoA 5.x

Read the install guide