Xgen Interactive Groomed Splines turning into polygons without shader

[PantheraAureus]

Hey guys,

I'm new to Xgen and it's probably an easily fixable problem. I started working with the Interactive Groomable Splines yesterday and created a mane on a lion I sculpted earlier (as a test). My goal is to create a mesh that could be used in a game. When I was more or less content with my result I turned the splines into polygons which took a few minutes but the result was relatively nice, geometry-wise. However, I didn't get a shader with it. All I can assign that is in any way related to Xgen is the surface shader also used for the splines but no actual hair shader. Does anybody know why that happens and/or how to fix this?

Additional question: After turning the splines into polygons the hair would take up 245k tris in the scene (it looks like it created a strand for every single hair; I already got CV down to 5)... My lion is 15k tris large and I'm going for 20k overall so the hair should only take up to 5k tris. How do I get Xgen to include several strands of hair into one card?

Thanks in advance!

[sean.heasley · Accepted solution]

Hi @PantheraAureus and welcome to the community!

We have an article with some information here that may help you. For the shader, since you're going to a game engine I would normally make it myself in a texturing application like photoshop or Substance Painter. You could also assign a Shaderfx Game Hair shader to view realistic game hair shading directly in the viewport.

(See Shaderfx Game Hair shader.)

As for the cards, since you're going for a game engine ready asset I really recommend watching the both parts of this tutorial series:

They're both fairly short and do a really solid job of explaining an Xgen to game poly workflow!

Please let me know if this information helps or if you need any more assistance!

If one or more of these posts helped answer your question, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

Kudos are greatly appreciated. Everyone likes a thumbs up!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @PantheraAureus

I'm just checking in again to see if you need more help with this. Did the suggestion I provided yesterday work for you?

If so, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

[PantheraAureus]

Hey Sean!

Sorry, I was pretty busy over the last few days. Yes, the video helped me undestand the standad xgen workflow for games a bit better! Thanks for the quick replies as well!