Xgen bugs

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am working with Xgen and have thoroughly enjoyed the process of working with hair, but have encountered so many issues that I don't know if they are repairable. If anyone has advice, I would greatly appreciate it. I have had unfortunate luck with finding any communication on forums for the issues I have encountered. If this is the wrong place, please direct me.

Prior to all of my problems, this is the groom for my character (wip):

Needs a lot of work, but it has been a great experience. However, as of two days ago these issues started happening:

1. I am no longer able to render in my render view. In my script editor after clicking render or refreshing an IPR it states: "Exporting Xgen Collections . . . Done"

2. My groomable splines are now 'exploding' as I preview the description and the often crash. I have attached an image for visual explanation:

Although I enjoy glitch art, this is my nightmare. It seems to be my modifiers that have gone haywire. As I begin to hide them there is a visual difference in the Kandinsky painting I receive.

My set up for the hair has been two collections:

 Scalp: overall hair (groomable spline), groom (spline), stragglers (spline)

 Eyebrow: overall (groomable spline), groom (spline)

I have been having issues for several days now - last night it was working - today is a different case. I believe all of my issues started occuring when either:

A- I added the second groomable spline description to the eyebrow collection.

B- I redirected the grooming auto export to the desktop on accident. I have since reconnected it to the project file.

C- I created a new project folder and copy/paste the scene and xgen collection, and copy/paste the xgen folder. I was working on a network rather than my direct drive and was curious if my system was lagging.

I have officially hit my wall of tolerance with Xgen and am sending out my SOS. Please help with any information.

Thank you,

Justin

[Anonymous]

Looks like the SeExpr built-in functions are all pure functions with no external data access. It should be implemented by the aplication embedding seExpr.
https://github.com/wdas/SeExpr/issues/3#issuecomment-3780466

Thanks anyway.

The thing is that we're producing a movie where an animal have it's face painted and we need a way to use a sequence of ptx for the fur color. Is there any way to achieve this via seExpr that you could come up? Maya crashes every time i hit render when a file node with a ptx sequence is applied to a xgen description.

Thanks again,

Jorge.

[Anonymous]

Following the help text inside the expression window i came up with this expression:

$a = map( "C:/path/to/folder/test.${PAL,myCycle}.ptx");\n$a

where myCycle is a simple cycle($frame,1,40) to enumerate my frame range. This seems to work partially as it finds the first map (with errors), but always throws the following error:

// Error: line 1: XGen:  Failed to open C:/path/to/folder/test.0040.ptx.
             Error: Can't open ptex file: C:/path/to/folder/test.0040.ptx
No such file or directory  //
// Error: line 1: XGen:  Failed to open .
             Error: Can't open ptex file:
No such file or directory  //
// Error: line 1: XGen:  Failed to open .
             Error: Can't open ptex file:
Invalid argument  //
// Error: line 1: XGen:  Failed to open .
             Error:   //

I can't get through it because it looks like it finds the file correctly but for whatever reason fails to open it

[Anonymous]

if i change my custom expression myCycle to:

$a = $frame;
$a

to enumerate the frame range, it seems to work with errors if i play the range, but renders fine.

Thanks Michael.

[Anonymous]

the above example only works for colors, not for driving attributes. For that you could use this other expression:

if($frame == 1) { $a= map( 'C:/path/to/folder/test_0001.ptx'); }
else if($frame == 2) {$a=map( 'C:/path/to/folder/test_0002.ptx'); }
.
.
.
else if($frame == 40) {$a=map( 'C:/path/to/folder/test_0040.ptx'); }

$a

Quite a PITA if you have a lot of frames, but this works for any attribute.

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Hi Justin,

I see you posted exactly the problem Im having regarding rendering archives on the farm. Did you manage to solve this problem? Any help would be appreciated. 

Regards

Faghrie