XGen output to geometry, primitive orientation

[dkrelina]

I'm trying to output xgen hairs to geometry so that I can bake the hair details onto to a low res mesh. The problem I'm running into is that when I do the output, the hair primitives are all facing the same direction and they have no thickness, causing weird artifacts in the normal map bake. Is there a way to add thickness or change the primitive orientation so that the strands are all pointing outward? Now that I think of it, I could probably do an extrude on all the geo, but that might kill Maya, considering the number of polygons in the scene! It would be great if I could paint orientation in a map. Is that possible? Any suggestions on baking normal maps from xgen to a low res mesh?

[Michael_Todd · Accepted solution]

This is a known limitation of the geo conversion and it's due to the fact that XGen defaults to a face camera orientation for the primitives. The conversion actually creates geo that faces the active camera and I've used a couple of things to workaround this.

1)  Create a preview from a set angle and use the select primitive tool in XGen to select the primitives facing the camera and convert those and work around the characters head to build up geo that aligns more to the head surface

2) create a very wide angle camera and place it near the center of the head and generate a preview. Then the primitives will all face in towards the camera and the converted geo will reflect this.

We are looking into adding a better alignment option for a future update.

Cheers

[dkrelina]

These are two interesting solutions. I never realised the orientation of the primitives were generated based on the camera angle. I managed to solve it by reducing the density a little and increasing the width, then extruding all faces a tiny amount once they were exported to geometry. It took a bit of time for Maya to process, but no crashes and the results look good!