topic Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes in Maya Forum

Xgen in referenced scenes?

MisterVal — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 15:34:35 GMT

Has anybody worked with referencing scenes witih xGen descriptions/collections in them? I'm still trying to learn the new toolset and just realized that when I reference a character, his hair isn't appearing in the scene.

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Christoph_Schaedl — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 06:23:51 GMT

referencing wont work with xgen... i assume you have to cache the hairs first...

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Karen.Snow — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 14:41:41 GMT

Unfortunately, at this time referencing is not supported in xGen.

Best Regards,

Karen

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

MisterVal — Thu, 29 May 2014 17:22:29 GMT

Hi Karen,

Thanks (very late) for that response. Now that Maya 2015 is out, it appears that referencing is still not supported with xGen. To be frank, this makes it of very little use for character work... Is there any plan to support referencing in future updates?

Or, am I missing a really easy workaround?

thanks!

val

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Karen.Snow — Thu, 29 May 2014 18:38:13 GMT

Hello,

There has been some improvements to referencing with Xgen in 2015.

Could the issue be specific to your file? What is your workflow.

I just ran a very simple test by creating a scene with an Xgen Description. Saved the file, and referenced it into a new file and it come through without issue. Can you test something simple like that to see if that works. If that does, then there is someting more specific to the way your file is set up thats causing complications.

Also, are you running the latest Service Pack (SP2) for Maya 2015?

Cheers

Karen

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

MisterVal — Thu, 29 May 2014 18:59:10 GMT

Hi Karen,

That's exactly what I tried before posting... I made a simple poly sphere with xgen hair, saved, and then referenced into a new scene. In the host scene, when xgen tries to update it gives an error: // Error: line 1: No object matches name: // as well as a center-screen warning that says "No Preview Visible. The description is not bound to any geometry in the scene."

My guess is that it is having trouble dealing with the namespace that is automatically applied when referencing (?)... I am on Maya 2015 SP1. SP2 isn't showing up in my application manager yet. I'll try SP2 at home this evening to see if that's the issue.

Thanks for looking into this!

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

MisterVal — Fri, 30 May 2014 18:59:56 GMT

Confirmed, I am getting the same error on Maya 2015 SP2.

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

MisterVal — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 18:02:01 GMT

^ bump ^

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Karen.Snow — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 18:53:58 GMT

I apologize for the delay, I missed your update.

I just tested this again in 2015 SP2 and I can reference files.

I have attached a test file that I created. Can you open this and let me know if this works on your end?

OriginalFile.ma is the basic xgen file I made

ReferencedFile.ma is the new file in which I referenced the original file.

It seems to come through without error on my end, so please test this file to see if this works. If this works then there must be something specific to your workflow that is different.

Let me know how it goes.

Cheers,

Karen

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

MisterVal — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 02:33:57 GMT

Hi Karen,

That file was very useful. It turns out that I had "use namespace" turned off in the reference dialogue. Didn't realize, because Maya was still inserting namespaces into nodes' names.

Anyway, I've got it working now, so thank you VERY much for your assistance. Cheers!

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 16:07:41 GMT

Hi there,

im having the same problem as MisterVal had, but in a different way.

I can reference it and i can see it in viewport. I can also render it in mental ray and it works. But i cannot make it work with Arnold. The only way i found it to work is exporting a .**** file from the Xgen scene and referencing it in my new scene.

Any suggestion? i think it must be something related with the path of the .****.gz it calls at rendering and the new namespace of the reference.

Thank you in advance

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Hugiell — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 15:29:16 GMT

Hello!

The problem I am having is that I CAN reference (child into parent) the file that uses XGen (child), but when I update the child, and I reload reference in parent scene reference DOESN'T update. The problem is that XGen collection file (*.xgen) of the parent stays the same, while it should be updated to be the same as *.xegn file of the child.

If you open the parent's xgen file in text editor, you can see that its parameters have old values. The solution I found is to copy the child's xgen file and rename it (e.g. parent__collection.xgen), but this is probably not the way to go in the long run.

Another workaround is to delete the reference, create new reference, deleting the parent's xgen file and saving (so that new xgen file is created).

In Karen's exampe above, the OriginalFile is child and ReferencedFile is parent.

Did anyone found a true solution?

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 02:57:32 GMT

hello,

Could you please tell me where to find the reference dialogue where you had "use namespace" turned off please, I can't find it.

Thank you

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Hugiell — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 06:07:09 GMT

Hi,

When you go to File > Create Reference (click the square icon to show options dialog), and at the bottom of the "Rerence Options" dialog box is a "Namespace Options" section with "Use namespaces" checkbox...

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 07:53:47 GMT

thank you

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

johnnyzxt — Sat, 27 Aug 2016 20:13:42 GMT

Hi, Karen , I have the same problem, but my problem was a little complicate. I used the xgen to generate a huge number of plants instance archives, and use xgen to produced a forest, and saved this xgen forest file as a MA maya named forest.ma, but when I open a new maya scene and reference it and render it ,it can't find the material SG because the namespace were added on the material SG name of archives when I referenced. So I have to edit each archive to modify the text in the archives. But I have a about 299 shots to deal with....So I found a way to export forest.ma using xgen to a mel, want to use a instanced polygon to render, but there are too many forest, I can't even rotate the scene, it was very heavy.

So, please help me, what should I do when I want use archives with material in a xgen file as a reference file ?

Re: xGen in Referenced Scenes

Michael_Todd — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 22:07:13 GMT

Open the hypershade, then from there File/Import and find the material (.ma) files for your archives and import them. This will reconnect the materials to the descriptions and it should be good..

Also, it's a good idea to make sure to add an absolute path to the XGen files in the XGen file path settings:

It's been covered in quite a few other posts on this and other forums but bears repeating in that you can have multiple file paths on the ; separated list, both relative and absolute can be mixed. If XGen can't find the files it needs in the first in the list, it will look to the next and so on till the files are found or the list ends...

Cheers

Michael