XGen & Mental Ray issues...

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

I was recently working on your tutorial “creating a pegasus using xgen” on digital tutors and ran into a few problems.

Everything worked fine until I tried to duplicate the left wing of the pegasus to the right.
The Wing always disappeared when I copied it over. I double checked the tutorial but I couldn’t find a solution. So I tried to do the right Wing manually. It worked, but just to a point where I can move the sliders for length, tilt, and so on. I was not able to use the same expressions from the left side. When I entered the expressions, the wing disappeared again. On every description layer and just for the right side.

Until now I haven’t found a solution for this…
I continued on the fur for the body and the hair for tail and mane. So far it worked ok. On the fur sometimes weird things happen like if I change the density value, the fur goes back into its default position and I have to style the fur from scratch (Just on the body).

I heard that the batch rendering makes problems too, so I already tried this out. And yes: My batch render is not working too. The live render works fine for me. But when I batch render, the whole fur, feathers and hairs are missing. There is just the horse model. I did it as in the tutorial: I am using mental ray renderer, set it to batch render, I exported patches for batch render, set the percent value to 100%, auto set the primitive bound, checked my render settings (rendering format: targa, correct frames and camera)… I tried a lot: updating the viewer for collections/descriptions, rendering a moving camera (checked on the animation box), the perspective cam and a camera which is not moving and of course: I set my project. My model has no animation, it is just changing the poses in every frame from 1-4. Sometimes XGen renders only the horse model, and when I try another render it sometimes renders nothing.

I am really desperate now.. I was doing research for the whole weekend on the internet and can’t find any solution for my problems. Actually there is not a lot about XGen on the internet so far.
I hope you guys could help me somehow. I really want to finish this project and continue using XGen.
I am working with the Student Version of Maya 2015 (Service Pack 5) and my renderer is mental ray.
I am using a Mac Book Pro OS X (Version 10.9.5).

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous]

Am I the only person who can't fix the duplicate description problem?? I was able to solve all my other problems exept for mirroring the wing to the other side. I really need help on this.. I can't render my project...
Always as soon as I copy expressions on the mirrored wing it disappears.

Just for people who ran into the same problems,

to render your renderlayers and cameras use this script:

int $nthFrame;

int $startTime = 1;

int $endTime = 10;

for( $nthFrame = $startTime; $nthFrame <= $endTime; $nthFrame++) {

currentTime $nthFrame;

renderWindowRender redoPreviousRender renderView;

xgmPreRendering;

}

you need to render the first render with the correct camera and renderlayer in liverenderer window and after that you can paste the script in the script editor and it will redo the previous render. 
There is also an issue on the grooming visibility (yellow fur). You should never uncheck the visibility box and save your scene.. somehow it sometimes deletes your ptex files and you have to start from scratch..

[pshwayka]

Hi Ekiem,

When you get to the part of the tutorial where you are about to duplicate the first set of feathers over to the right side, and he has you create an new decription called "temp" just so you can create a new collection, try this:

As soon as the new collection is created (namely Wing_Right) and before you try to copy the left side descriptions over, go into the xgen directory  (the one that's inside the project directory) and copy the archives folder into the collections/Wing_Right folder.  Then select the appropriate row of faces on the right side and do the "Replace with selected faces" command.

FWIW, that's how I got it to work...but there's definitely something odd going on with search paths in that tutorial's project files.

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot pshwayka!
I'll give it a try toinght.. Hope that helps!! 
But I am almost done with my scene... need to fix the wing issue and still got flickering on the fur 😕
Does anyone know what's the best way to fix the flickering on XGen fur (just using directional light; mental ray)? 

[Anonymous]

Okay... I still can't fix it.
Same issue.
I copied the folder into the Wing_Right and followed the tutorial once again...
As soon as I select the appropriate row of faces on the right and hit "replace with selected faces" I get just these tiny pink x markers on each face. Even if I try to preview the collection- no feathers.. (see attachement) 😞 

What I'm also wondering about is, that for some reason I can't find the Wing_left Collection in the xgen directory...(attachement) and it's also not updating the Wing_right with the prinmary_right description in my directory. Really strange... and I am pretty sure that the Wing_left collection was there before I duplicated it!! But it's still updating in the viewport and rendering as well...

I think I will keep trying to get it done.. still hoping that anybody can help 😕

[pshwayka]

Hi again, Ekiem.

Have you posted any of your issues in the Digital Tutors forums?  I did the tutorial up to the point where you were having the problem, just so I could see what the issue was, and was able to reflect the feathers over with my odd workaround.

What I'm getting at is, I don't think this is an issue with XGen...I think it may be an issue with the tutorial files from DT, and you may have more success asking them directly.

I hope you have success there!

[Anonymous]

I already wrote a message to the instructor.. I hope he is answering and can help.

hmmm Actually I used my own horse model and wings... It's just the feathers from digital tutors.. but perhaps there might be something wrong with these..
I post it here if I'm gonna find a solution. 🙂
But thanks!