Xgen Hair
Giulia Satmary
I am struggling with following Problem: I want to simulate Photorealistic long Hair in Maya, using Arnold as a Renderer. I made my Grooming with Xgen, simulated the Movement, but as soon as I attach the Hair System, my Preview starts to play crazy. It looks like it follows the Direction, but not the Movement of the Simulation... I would very vany Help...
Did you create the animwire maps? You can choose to use the guides as points for the control maps (if you have a clump modifier and are using the guides as clump points, you can use the clump maps as control maps.
I tried at least 5-8 Times, and I only managed to achive something whats looks a little bit like what I want to see in one Case... One Time he doesnt find Guides, even altough I have created them. One other Time I try to manually make them, and they show up in the Outliner, but not on the Surface of my Object. In other Cases the Guides and Animation doest follow the Head at all, altought I attached the Hair system. I did actually attach the description to the Head, but it doesnt work either... I followed every Step of the Dokumentation about Animwires - as I said, it worked one time, 7 Times not... Might it be, that Xgen has a lot of Bugs?
Wen you attached the wires in the animwire modifier, did you have the curves selected or the group? If you have the group selected, the attachment will fail, you have select the actual output curves from the hair system
Do the output curves for the nHair system match up to the guides? If they do, you could alos use guide animation, either by caching the output curves to an alembic file, or converting the curves to guides and maintaining a dynamic link (via the curves to guides utility after deleting the original guides) Also, you might want to run the guide check utility to make sure you don't have bad guides of some form, like guides on top of each other or duplicates.
I have tried kind of EVERYTHING, but it doesnt work. I selected the Curves bevore Attaching, tried to Parent everything to the Geo, made Caches, ect. If I convert the Curves to Guides again, I loose the simulation, they are stiff again, it just doesnt work... I used the check Function, it didnt detect any Errors...
How were the curves being used as animwires made? If the curves were made outside of nHair or XGen (from Guides or generated in the animwire modifier) then the UV parameterization of the curves could be reversed, which could lead to what you are seeing. XGen expects the curve UV's to be 0 at the base and 1 at the tip and if this is reversed, the animwires could not work properly. Reverse the curve direction and re-attach. (selecting the curves, not the group)
no, the Static Groom isnt following the Geo, I dont know why, even if I Parent the Description to the Head. I have made two new Testscenes, but neither of them worked... I couldnt attach the .zip-s, so I attached the "old" Scene it was, I hope you can open it.
Then make a blend shape deformer with the copy in the group as the target so that the scalp geo that XGen is bound to deforms to follow the grouped geo, Select the copy then the bound geo when making the blendshape.
Then you should ideally get rid of the rigid body collider for the bound geo and make a new one for the grouped geo. It's advisable not to have a hair system bound to a shape that it is also colliding with, it can cause popping at the base of the simulation curves.
the reason the hair was not following the mesh was that XGen could not see any transform on the mesh as it was animated in a group. Using a blend shape ensures that the animation is propagated through to XGen
hi this is mrigank i am new to xgen and i saw the forum discussion but my problem is completely different...i am learning xgen now and i have created a xgen hair with three different collection for eye brows, eye lashes, and scalp hair in two differnt descriptions under one collection....
i used the place and shape guide option for hair generation...Basically i have created one collection for eyebrows and one collection for eyelashes and one collection for scalp hair...the eyebrows and eyelashes are static....but the hair on head is in two different parts...one is static on the head the other is dynamic using anim curves i.e., pony tail....and i have created a hair system nd attached the tail to it...but my animation is a mocap so i have retargeted my rig to the mocap ...
i have ma de a copy of the scalp and eyebrows as well as lashes and applied xgen on them but when the character moves on the retargeted mocap animation the hairs are no following them the animation curves on the tail are simulating as well as moving along with the head but the rest of the hair are static..pls help...
I just finished creating some hair for my character using Xgen Interactive Groom Editor. After creating the hair I attatched the scalp mesh back to the head mesh using 'Merge Vertecies' Then once I completely finished with the hair I attempted to connect the head to the body but before I did this i tried to move the head. It turns out the hair is staying in place but the head is moving seperately. Ive included to images of this bellow.
I'm just checking in again to see if you need more help with this. Did the suggestion I provided yesterday work for you?
If so, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.
the hair on the eyebrows is there however the scalp hair is not. I beleive this is because there is an alembic cache piped into the scalp hair whereas the eyebrows have no such cache. The alembic file itself is not piped in through a standard maya abc node. it uses something called xgmsplineCache
So i imported the hair, beard, eyelashes, eyebrows and peachfuzz all separate into UE but i wanted to ask if anyone has any suggestions how to shade the hair. I tried to use the Meet Mike Digital Human hair material but when i apply it it still uses the HairDefaultMaterial so i may need to manually shade it or copy the material nodes. I cant seem to be able to change the material.
Anyone know how to add a root color to my hair material, i used the image from the documentation to create hair color variation per hair seed but i also want so add a darker color to the root, perhaps use the length as a start but after that how do i create a gradient from root to tip?
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Not really, its a project I took on a few months ago when I was just starting in Blender. As for now I would probably keep it around less than half that size. As you say, too small models bring up other issues, with clothes for instance.
Xgen has nice tools, region control to split a haircut, you can layer multiple clump and noise modifiers, but I prefer Blender brushes to comb hair.
Surprisingly, even when I use the default parameters, both software give really similar results.
Thanks for this Rimasson! looks very good and cant wait to try it.
During these last few days Ive been giving some serious attention to Blender hair and its workarounds.
My conclusion is that the basic problem lies in the fact that we have to work with the particles themselves which can often become a serious burden to the system thus making hair grooming a very tedious and counterintuitive task when creativity and eye for detail is needed the most.
I still havent figured out how to make the object mode view consistent with the rendered hair. Ive tried every suggestion in this thread and it still looks puffier and fuller, less detailed than the rendered version, so yes, Ill keep trying to perfect it and check this addon but in the meantime Ill be giving xgen a try to see and compare how easier it is to shape the guides instead of the hair particles.
My name is Malte Resenberger-Loosmann and I usually lead small teams or jump into hard-surface modeling for AAA and indie game projects on a daily basis. In this article, I want to explain how I got out of my comfort zone, why it is important to do so, and how you as an artist can benefit from it.
As is usual for any 3D projects, I searched online for references and the style I wanted to go with. Shape and volume are very important when it comes to hair creation. It is also beneficial to layer the hairstyle and build one pass after another to get great volume and coverage for part of the head.
I drew parts of my strategy to help me focus on one part and move to the next layer in my progression. It also allows me to get an overview of where I am after some time. Analyzing the references made it clear that most hair cards have to be clumped together as it is typical hair behavior. It is important to achieve an organic and non-linear look, which can be generated in FiberShop by using different modifiers such as Clamp, Curl, and Randomize length and thickness of roots and tips.
I know that some artists do their entire hair cards in Maya by using XGen and Arnold to render all necessary maps, such as ambient occlusion, flow maps, root gradients, and so on. However, in FiberShop, it can all be baked in one go. Later, I used XGen in Maya to generate single flyaway hairs, as the workflow is very straightforward.
After creating the first hair cards, I moved on to implementing them in Maya with GS CurveTools. I applied the first three cards of the texture to actual geometry bound on a curve. This way, you can choose a good variation of hair cards while covering the head geometry. Usually, this sheet of curved geometry will grow as you create more and more variations of different layers of hair.
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