Xgen adjust the cards pivot ?

[Anonymous]

Hey,

is it possible to simple change the pivot or change the location where they are get bend ? I want to create grass from a texture with those cards and everytime I am bend them they are get bend in the middle.

Thanks

[Michael_Todd]

You can use the offset or displace parameter to move the cards up or down from the surface. The bend location can be moved as well, via the Bend Param U and V

Have you though about using regular splines rather than cards The width ramp can help make grass blade shapes.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply even though this thread is old 🙂 Well I really would like to use cards because I have made textures which I then want to apply onto these cards. (Photo textures). I have tried your advice using the bend param u/v but unfortunately, this doesn't solve my problem. The cards still get bends symmetrical but I want that the pivot gets bends from the bottom.

Like this which I can achieve with the bend deformer:

Regards

[Michael_Todd · Accepted solution]

You can apply textures to splines, which have intrinsic UV's. To create variation you might need to have a few descriptions with different generation seeds and materials but as a very simple example:

These are just regular splines, whose pivot is always at the base, with a slight bend applied

With a phong shader attached to the description you can just apply a texture map to the color and transparency channels:

With ray traced lights, the shadows should work as expected with a little extra setup

I used an aiStandard as the surface shader and the phong as the material shader (as aiStandard doesn't display correctly in the VP

and the phong doesnt render the transparency in Arnold correctly

but it's simple enough to use one for the VP and the other for the render:

with some simple randomization via a global expression, with just one texture:

 

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Wow! Thanks, I didn't know that I can apply a texture to splines but now I am facing a problem that the splines are somehow beeing view dependent while using cards I could choose if they should use the view camera or not. How would I disable it for splines ? 

But so far it is a quite good result 😄

(I have marked the problem zones)

Regards

[Michael_Todd · Accepted solution]

Just turn off "Face Camera' on the primitives tab.

What you see in the VP may not necessasily be what you get in the render, mind, as the transparency sorting is not the same as in renders.

You can use the about N or twist to adust the spline direction with face camera off..

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Great Great Great. Everything works as expected, Thanks !