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XGen reverting to older version of guides on import

adnanmg
Advocate

XGen reverting to older version of guides on import

adnanmg
Advocate
Advocate

Hi,

 

in Maya 2016, I am creating hair using XGen and placing guides. Since referencing causes issues (such as guides exploding at times when loading scenes with referenced xgen files), I am simply importing the xgen scenes into my lighting files. Usually this works fine. However, on a couple of grooms, where I deleted some guides, I notice that when I import the updated file into the lighting scene, I keep getting the old guides.

 

For example:

 

groom_v1.mb contains guide #1-200

groom_v2.mb contains guide #400-534

 

groom_v2.mb does not contain any of the guides from groom_v1. It is the same collection and descriptions, but having worked further, now the guides are completely different.

 

For some reason, when importing groom_v2.mb into a new scene file, I keep getting the guides from groom_v1.mb.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks,

 

Adnan

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adnanmg
Advocate
Advocate
Accepted solution

Figured it out. With the scene file, there is a .xgen file saved that contains those old guides I guess. That extra file needs to be deleted, before importing the new hair. I am not sure what the purpose of that extra .xgen file is.

 

Adnan

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Michael_Todd
Alumni
Alumni

The 'Extra' XGen file is not an extra, it is the main XGen file associated with the Maya scene file in the scenes directory. Ideally, when exporting a collection or description, you export them to a separate location from the scene files. Your master lighting scene file should not have an XGen file associated with it before importing the collection you exported to the separate location. This will prevent any version mismatches such as the one you ran unto, where the XGen file associated with the scene was overriding the imported collection.

 

After importing the XGen collection to your scene, you can then select the "Export as Delta" option, then save the scene. Then when any changes are made to the descriptions, they are saved out to a delta file and the original XGen file is not altered. 

 

Cheers

 



Michael Todd

XGen Product Owner and Designer

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adnanmg
Advocate
Advocate

This is good info, thank you. Regarding importing xgen, I have been importing a file with the character setup with xgen, then blendshaping the head copy with hair emitters wrap deformed to it to the head on the animated rig.

 

Is there a preferred way to bring in XGen to shot files that differs from this? Also, I am working on figuring out script access to XGen. I asked a question in the Maya programming and scripting forum about this a while back.

 

Thanks,

 

Adnan

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Michael_Todd
Alumni
Alumni

If you have the scalp mesh in the character rig, so long as it's named the same as the one you used to create the groom, you can create alembic an alembic cache for the character for the shot, including the scalp. You then merely have to import the XGen file, into the scene (with Namespace if needed) and XGen will find and bind to the cache driven scalp shape. This can be scripted and when I used XGen in production, we had a shot tool to do all this for us. You'd pick the character, the shot cache, the published groom and then the tool would build the scene. 

 

There are docs for the XGen API that list the commands you'd need to do this type of task:

 

XGen API

 

Cheers

 



Michael Todd

XGen Product Owner and Designer

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