Cannot create density mask in XGen

[tomislav.bosnic1]

When I create a density mask on my mesh in XGen, I get the following error:

Maya then switches to the paint tool, but painting on the mesh does nothing. My project had been set beforehand. Through a lot of googling and testing things, I've found that applying a lambert material and moving the mesh's UV map to the 0-1 tile solves the issue.

However, this is problematic as the mesh is using an aiStandardSurface shader that's connected to a displacement map, fitted out with textures, and also utilizes UDIMs. Hopefully there is something I can do about this?

Thanks in advance!

[Christoph_Schaedl]

You need to assign a lambert shader to the groom object.

[tomislav.bosnic1]

Hey, thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I can't do that, since as I mentioned I need the mesh with an aiStandardSurface shader to support my displacement maps; and even if I could use lambert, I still wouldn't be able to use Maya's paint tool as I'm utilizing UDIMs which makes it impossible for the desired UVs to all be in the 0-1 tile.

I have, however, a few moments ago learned about "scalp geometry" which isn't something that occurred to me at all as I'm a complete beginner with XGen. I think that making the necessary scalp geometry, giving it an equal amount of subdivision iterations in Arnold as the original mesh, wrap deforming it to the original mesh, then putting the groom on it and hiding the geometry itself will be the workaround I'm looking for.

In case anyone in the future stumbles upon a similar or identical situation, the above steps and the ones that come beforehand are very handily outlined in this tutorial: https://www.mikecauchiart.com/single-post/2017/08/29/Beginners-guide-to-XGen-pipeline-for-beginners

[estebobo1996]

duplicate the faces where you want to generate hair. if you want to simulate it then just duplicate the model and change the material to lambert you can hide the duplicate and later just render it separately

[Jagadnath]

Thanks. Worked for me. I'm a newbie for XGen...