Unreal Hair Groomer / Hair & Grooming Artist

Location: Fully Remote - Worldwide

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Type: Full-time

The Role

We’re looking for an experienced Hair Groomer / Hair & Grooming Artist with strong Unreal Engine experience to help create highly realistic, cinematic character hair for a next-generation gaming experience.

You’ll take ownership of the hair and grooming pipeline, from creating and styling hair through to getting it working beautifully in Unreal Engine 5.

This is a specialist role for someone who is obsessive about realism, understands how hair behaves in the real world, and knows how to translate that into a convincing real-time experience.

You’ll work closely with character artists, animators and technical developers to ensure hair looks natural not only when a character is standing still, but also during movement, interaction and gameplay.

Responsibilities

• Create and develop high-quality character hair and grooming for real-time use
• Build realistic hairstyles, including both natural and highly detailed groomed looks
• Work with strand-based hair and grooming workflows and prepare assets for Unreal Engine 5
• Optimise hair assets for real-time performance without compromising visual quality
• Work closely with character artists to ensure hair integrates seamlessly with characters and costumes
• Collaborate with technical artists and developers on hair simulation, physics and runtime behaviour
• Ensure hair responds naturally to character movement, animation and environmental conditions
• Develop and refine grooming techniques to achieve highly realistic results
• Troubleshoot technical and visual issues throughout the hair pipeline
• Help establish and improve the studio's hair/grooming workflow and standards
• Contribute to R&D around next-generation real-time hair and character realism

Requirements

• Strong professional experience in hair grooming for games, VFX, animation or digital humans
• Excellent understanding of realistic hair creation and grooming
• Strong Unreal Engine 5 experience
• Experience working with strand-based hair / groom systems
• Understanding of real-time hair rendering, simulation and optimisation
• Strong eye for realism, proportion, movement and detail
• Experience taking hair from creation through to a working real-time Unreal implementation
• Comfortable working closely with character artists, animators and technical teams
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently
• A portfolio demonstrating high-quality realistic hair and grooming work

Highly Desirable

• Experience with MetaHuman / digital human workflows
• Experience with Unreal's Groom / Hair Strands systems
• Experience with Houdini, Maya, XGen, Blender or equivalent grooming tools
• Experience with hair simulation and physics
• AAA game, VFX or high-end digital human experience
• Experience working on photorealistic characters
• Understanding of real-time performance optimisation

The Opportunity

This is an opportunity to work on a highly ambitious, realism-focused project where hair is an important part of creating believable digital characters.

You’ll have significant creative and technical ownership of the grooming process, working alongside a multidisciplinary team across gameplay, animation, character art and technology.

Fully remote — work from anywhere in the world.