correct xgen fur/hair pipeline?

[finkgab_]

Hi, I recently had to quickly learn xgen for a project, and I kept running into problems which I ended up working around instead of solving, due to the lack of time for the project.
So now that that's done and that more projects involving xgen are on the horizon I wanted to ask: what's the right xgen pipeline for an animated production?

My usual pipeline is:

model -> rig -> reference rig for animation -> reference animation for lighting and render

So after learning xgen but finding no information about this online, I figured it should be something like this:

model -> rig -> reference rig for animation -> referenced animation for hair and fur with xgen -> referenced fur for lighting and render.

I made some tests and found out that Maya wouldn't read the xgen file after being referenced, despite reading online that it should after v2015 or something like that. I made several tests and couldn't get it to work.

I ended up working on the fur and lighting on the same file due to this, which worked because it was just one shot and I was responsible for both tasks, but it may not be the case next time.

Also xgen proved to be quite unstable, as groom descriptions randomly got corrupted/messed up (I don't have a screenshot of this, but hair primitives of half of the descriptions would look as if they 'exploded', taking up all the viewport screen, with random, blown up scale,width, length and orientation. But the groomable splines of those descriptions were correct, so it wasn't a ptex issue I figured).
I ended up having to go back a couple of backup files before that random problem (this happened so often I decided to make several backups of maya files, xgen files and ptex maps as I went along), but the weird thing is that several backup files which were working before also got "corrupted" when this happened.
I don't know if this has to do with my pipeline or if it is a problem with xgen integration into Maya.

I would greatly appreciate any light you could shed on this subject.

This was on Maya 2016 and tried on several Win7 machines.

[Michael_Todd]

The grom exploding issue was a bug where saving the scene file with the groom spline hidden could cause corruption of the data in the maya scene. The workaround was to NOT preview after loading a problem scene and just to import the groom files form disc to rebuild the data in the maya session. This issue has since been fixed and should be in the 2016 ext 2 release. 

As your other issues, XGen can be referenced though there were issues in the initial 2014 ext 1 release and early versions of 2015. Namespaces were not fully supported but this has been addressed. How XGen has been utilized in productions, though obviously this is not written in stone, is to create grooms and publish them to a depository. When publishing, the data path setting is changed to the depository location for the published grooms. The data path can be a mix of absolute and relative paths and xgen will look though them in order till it finds the files it needs

When referencing files created from other projects, it's best to use absolute paths to the xgen folders for that groom so that other machines can resolve the paths.

If XGen is created on geo that is part of a character, so long as the geo is the same topology and named the same as the geo xgen was bound to, you can also just import the published xgen file to the scene with the character in, and give it a namespace if needed and the collection will be rebuilt on the geo with the same name it was originally bound to. If the topology was changed, it will likely not work correctly.

Cheers

[info]

Hey,
useful information

http://sharktacos.com/Forums/misc.php?action=help&hid=51