[Maya] Yeti vs XGen

[Sebastien Sterling]

Hey there, would like to take an opportunity to survey people transitioners or old hands, about Hair/fur systems in Maya.

I've already seen Yeti used to great effect, in and out of production.

Has anyone used Xgen ? cause despite the hype, the implementation at the very least from the demo, looks convoluted as all hell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15PJ4v_f-2I

It seems to embrace all the tenants of Maya design philosophy, e.g: ... It's broken out of the box, no seriously the guy apologises like 4 times in the video before showing workarounds.

Would love to hear if anyone has used it in production, and if it is actually useful, or if it is yet another Maya "Feature"...

(Ps: yes i know Yeti is not commercially available in the US, but if we could restrict this to the technical ?.)

[Tim Leydecker]

I´m pretty excited about xgen.

Not as a replacement for yeti fur, though.

The thing about yeti isn´t just it´s grooming controls,
it has loads of tools for actually animating&simulating
fur and then caching things into somewhat reliable caches.

That said, i still don´t have fully understood the whole yeti process
and find myself battling with it more than i would like to have to.

Still, I haven´t seen anything from xgen that shows that level of
dynamic simulation&animation control you have with yeti.

For me, xgen is starting to look more like an alternative to http://www.multiscatter.com/

Multiscatter is for 3DSmax.

It´s so easy to use, it makes me weep when I think about it while trying to nicely
scatter or distribute *anything* in Maya...

Cheers,


tim

[Sebastien Sterling]

Work flow wise, i guess from my limited exposure to ICE i  can appreciate the node based interface, even if it is really more of a jenga tower

XGen just seems like a mess, i'm willing to concede that the power is there but the interface is hellish, you have to flip through so many windows so many parameters in a non linear fashion, worse if you forget some of the steps or to tick a box here or there, you might have to start from the beginning. it tries to give the impression of linear workflow with the wizard for the profile descriptions but its such a convoluted setup.

I could see it working in a feature film environment, where you sometimes get a year to groom a character, but not in any other format. it looks like yet another horrible staple AD has introduced to the industry with zero scalability.

Yes multi-scatter looks interesting, thanks Tim.

Maybe someone can rework xGen's setup, i assume that "Dude its like so OPEN bro..." applies here too.

More then anything i'm frustrated, when i started out in cg Hair/fur where fairly out of the grasp of the individual. i feel now that we have reached the point where this should no longer be the case. i always felt that ICE was expedient enough that all that was missing was a grooming interface to interact with guides.

Why do these people not get that tools should be simple, the creative process is so all consuming. The last thing we need is to have to dick around for 3 hours before we even get to the grooming. hair and fur to this day is its own discipline, i don't think it should be, i think the tools are so shit that only the clinically insane few willing to abase them selves to jumping through those loops can thrive.

So, "simple", and so far "simple" is the only goal i would risk conceding, because heaven forbid that they should make it FUN to use.

The mentality is that it's not because you are good at grooming hair, but you are good at navigating the tool. we need to break from this, this is not good.

Lord i hope the Fabric Guys can see this.

Rant off.

[Raffaele Fragapane]

XGen isn't really a case of "gawd, it's so open, brah!".

If you need actual hair and feathers Yeti is certainly worth a look at, XGen has a way to go before it'll do the same things editing and dynamics wise.

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Sebastien Sterling
<sebastien...@gmail.com> wrote:
> XGen just seems like a mess, i'm willing to concede that the power is there
> but the interface is hellish, you have to flip through so many windows so
> many parameters in a non linear fashion,

> worse if you forget some of the
> steps or to tick a box here or there, you might have to start from the
> beginning.

I don't think that this is true, or at least I'd like to have an
example of that. In the "Create Description" dialog, you actually
just decide if you want groomable splines or not. Every other choice
you can change later with the equivalent drop down in the Primitive
tab. There is only one "generator" operator in XGen.

That 1h hour seminar, which I've re-watched before writing this, is
meant for people a little bit past the first 10 minutes understanding
of how XGen is structured, but rather goes right to mid-level tricks.
It's totally fair to criticize XGen for being seExpr-based (though
the UI will help you write the expressions when it can), and based on
PTex. However, the interface is not "all over the place". Everything
is in the XGen Window, there are no menus or stuff hidden in the
Outliner or elsewhere. You'd be working with the primitives setup in
Primitives tabs, then the operator stack , if you use it, is in
Modifiers, then everything you'll need in grooming is in the Grooming
tab.

[Gerbrand Nel]

Hey guys
I'm in deep shit right now.
Tomorrow is deadline and my scene refuses to render.
I'm rendering fur on characters animated in maya.
All animations gets exported as alembic files for me to fur and render
in houdini.
I've rendered 9 shots with almost no problems, but the last shot just
keeps crashing.
Where do I start trouble shooting?
Here is what I've done so far
I've changed the sampling up and down.
Changed the tile size up and down by factors of 8
I've changed the tile order
I've even rebuilt the scene from scratch based on a scene that renders fine.
I've created new cameras and deleted the alembic cameras.
This is my first "real" job in houdini, and allot is riding on this. I
had to convince allot of people that they can trust me to deliver this
job in houdini.

Help my dumb-ass please!!

G

Here is a error log from one of the crashed frames:

.........................
PROGRESS: 0.54/1
PROGRESS: 0.55/1
PROGRESS: 0.56/1
PROGRESS: 0.57/1
PROGRESS: 0.58/1
PROGRESS: 0.59/1
PROGRESS: 0.60/1
PROGRESS: 0.61/1
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini
14.0.361\houdini\scripts\hqueue\hq_render_from_hip.py", line 4, in <module>
hqlib.callFunctionWithHQParms(hqlib.renderFromHip)
File "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini
14.0.361\houdini\scripts\hqueue\hqlib.py", line 1848, in
callFunctionWithHQParms
return function(**kwargs)
File "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini
14.0.361\houdini\scripts\hqueue\hqlib.py", line 1011, in renderFromHip
_invokeRopAndCatchErrors(rop, project_name, frame, True)
File "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini
14.0.361\houdini\scripts\hqueue\hqlib.py", line 441, in
_invokeRopAndCatchErrors
raise e
hou.OperationFailed: The attempted operation failed.
Error: Command Exit Code: -1073741819

[Stefan Kubicek]

I know nothing about Houdini, but what I would try first is remove objects
from the scene bit by bit to find the offending one (I would guess it's
the fur object(s).

Once you have identified the problematic object see if there is anything
you can change on it (like re-export from Maya with a slightly different
hair count or segment count, or by splitting it up in two separate
objects/hair clumps.

At least that's what I'd start with in case of total lack of other hints
at the actual source of the problem.
Good luck!

--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at
-- This email and its attachments are --
--confidential and for the recipient only--

[Simon van de Lagemaat]

I would try and contact sesi support, they are super responsive.

[Tim Leydecker]

I know nothing about Houdini.

Is there a chance that your machine had the Maya 2016SP1 update recently?

There´s some noise about Maya2016SP1 giving problems with scenes that worked
fine in Maya 2016 before. It´s always a good idea to delete the Maya
user preferences
(or rename the iamthisuser>my documents>maya>2016 folder, then have
fresh prefs
generated for you).

I´d check the alembic file written, for changes in the exporter or
alembic version.
Then I´d see if I can render the scene with alembic but no fur, then
only fur, etc.

I´d also swap the alembic in a scene that worked, just to see if it´s
that. No fur, with fur.

Recreate the fur cache if the alembic renders in that scene.

Could be something simple like running out of disk space for fur caching
after sim or
something OS´ish, with read&write permissions.

Recently, I had a file directory created in Linux on an external drive
that ran fine for me
both on Linux and Windows until I tried to open that directory on
another machine,
with some user rights woes kicking in...

Sounds like a nice project with potentially good results.

The devil always kills you with what you love.

If you don´t care, you won´t have such problems...