Xgen description bound to no geometry in scene

[Anonymous]

I am applying hair to an animated character. For that I created an extra folder in my projects scenedirectory where I am doing my grooming on a alembic of the animation.

The animation has changed slightly and now I want to transfer it. When exporting all my Groom and the Collection and import it onto the new alembic it can not be previewed as the title says.

Why is it not bound and is there a different way of transfering the groom, because that way XGen always creates a second collection whereas I just want the already excisting collection to be bound to the new alembic.

Also (not directly related to my main problem):

After that I want to bring the Groom into my lightingscene. I would just go about importing the scenefile where I did my grooming and hide the alembic.

Is that correct, because that way it is not directly assigned to the Rig.

[Michael_Todd · Accepted solution]

So long as the topology has not changed, just the animation, you could just use a blendshape on the geo to a cache of the new animation. Then you could cache out the XGen patches for batch rendering with the new animation.

You could also export the collection to an xgen file, then load the cached geo for the new animation in a new scene. If the name of the geo is the same as the one that Xgen was bound to, and the topology is the same, you could just import the XGen file and rebuild the collection on the geo with the new animation. If the geo is in a namespace, you can import the XGen file into the same namespace when you import.

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Okay thank you. You mentioned the batch export. Small additional question about that. When I export my grooming for batch render XGen creates the abc file at the same location as the scene. When I save the scene again under a different name, e.g. to version up or so, XGen does not seem to also save the abc agian for this new Mayafile. I work around it by just dublicating the abc file and renaming it so that it matches the new scenes name. Is that the correct workflow or is there a hidden checkbox or so to let Xgen also save the abc file when renaming the scene.

[Michael_Todd]

You can delete the old version and re export the patches as well, it might be safer as the naming of the alembic file is important.

[kuskulu]

Hi Michael, 

If you have one character referenced with namespace in a scene, when you export patches for batch rendering, it works but if you have multiple characters referenced with namespace and  patches that have same name,it does not work. I think Alembic cache see just one patch name, How can I fix this issue?

[Michael_Todd]

Glitch Double Post

[Michael_Todd]

Each patch has to be in it's own, unique namespace. If two or more patches have the same name, in the same namespace, XGen will fail to find the correct one.

If you try to export patches for batch rendering without saving, an error message will tell you to save the scene first. After saving the scene the export will run through the frame range (in the above case it ran through three times) to export the alembic caches for each patch. Each patch get's it's own namespaced version:

Each patch needs it's own cache as each will have it's own transforms.

The XGen folders created for the namespaced versions of the collections will be empty as the the only the paths in the original version are needed for the referenced versions. 

Cheers

[kuskulu]

Actually in my scene, each patch has its own unique namespace but same
patch name, I think Alembic ignores namespaces and considers just patch
name. So I must create new patches with different names and import my
collections and descriptions, but one of my shots has 15 characters, it is
really hard to create for me:) Is there a solution for that?

Thanks,

[kuskulu]

Sorry Michael, I did not realized images you shared:)  when I look  at your images, it seems working:)

[Michael_Todd]

it's expected that the base name for the patch is the same, as it's being referenced. The namespace is what makes it unique. The namespace is saved to the alembic files name and xgen looks for the patches in their relevant namespaces. if the files are on disc then you shouldn't need to do anything else. the example I posed earlier was just done for this thread today and I didn't have to anything else to get to work:

Are you just referencing xgen grooms or are you referencing almbic caches for the characters and importing XGen onto those?

If it;s the latter, you can import XGen into a namespace from the Import Collections or Descriptions dialogue:

Just add the relevant namespace and hit import and so long as the patch geo is in the scene (under the given namespace) then XGen will find that geo and rebuild the collection on it. 

In production we had a tool called shot buddy that would automate the import process based on the shot setup, you'd get a shot and the database would tell shotbuddy which characters were in the shot and which grooms they'd need then you'd hit setup and it would build the shot based on which characters and grooms you wanted (to sim for instance)

If you don't have anything like that setup, I'm afraid it will be a bit tedious but 15 characters shouldn't take that long. It sounds like something you could script and XGen has import commmands for scripts like this. They are covered in the documentation: 

Import XGen Collections

XGen Python API

I hope this helps

[kuskulu]

my maya scene something like that;     and  export my patches for batch render the I started to render, Just one character is rendered:(

[Michael_Todd]

are the alembic files on disc for the patches?

[kuskulu]

yes, in my project folder.

[kuskulu]

yes, in my project folder.

[Michael_Todd]

Would it be possible to use Maya's Archive Scene tool to zip up the scene for me to look at? It might be a file path issue but if one groom is rendering, the others should.

Using the archvie scene will zip up all the files that XGen uses in the scene as well...

[kuskulu]

Hi Michael,

I was using Maya 2016 ext 2 sp1 in this project and I opened my scene in Maya 2017 update 3, I did all Xgen setup  for batch rendering and it worked finally. It seems Maya 2017 handled this. Does maya 2016 has a bug about that? Do you know anything about that? Thanks in advance.

[Michael_Todd]

2016 ext 2 should be good as well. There were some name space issues in 2014 and 2015, but we addressed them for 2016. Glad to hear you've got it working in 2017, though I'm not sure why it didn't it 2016

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Xgen is the most stuppied Plugin in the world

[Anonymous]

It's true. XGen is absolute trash and I'm not sure where they came up with all the file naming conventions with floating "collections" and "descriptions" that are hard-mapped to profoundly stupid directory placement. XGen simply doesn't work. They need better programmers.