When creating long hair, simple tubes will give you a good idea of how the hairstyle will look before you create the instanced curves.īefore creating any XGen nodes, mock up your asset using simple, low-resolution geometry. Mock up your asset using low-res geometry before you begin working with XGen. For long hair, it is best practice to start off with guides to describe each hair clump, which provides more control over root-to-tip variations. In general, I like to use a full procedural workflow for instancing short, densely packed objects, like fur and scales, or environments. Although you can switch later, the type of assets you are going to produce will determine the type of workflow you use. When you create a new Description, XGen launches a wizard to guide you through the key decisions.
Thinking about how are you going to structure your workflow is paramount to getting work done on time. The sooner you lock this decision, the better able you will be to deal with changes. The base model in the images below is 0a Blonde Girl, a free asset available via TurboSquid.ĭecide early whether you want to use guides to control instanced geometry, or adopt a fully procedural workflow.
This isn’t a beginner’s guide, so we’ll be assuming that you already have some familiarity with basic XGen workflows. Although they are all tailored to Maya, they can be considered general guidelines when producing new work using any instancing framework. The following tips are designed to make your workflow more flexible when using XGen in production, enabling you to accommodate the changes that feature work requires. It is essentially an interface to a complex render procedural and can be, in a way, considered a full shading tool. It lets you distribute arbitrary geometry over a surface by means of maps, expressions and guides. As computational power increases, instancing is becoming an increasingly integral part of the surfacing and shading process in modern CG pipelines.ĭeveloped at Walt Disney Animation Studios, and integrated into Maya 2016, XGen is a powerful instancing framework. It is well suited to creating visually complex assets such as fur, hair or feathers, as well as large-scale environments like forests, grassy fields and rocky landscapes. Procedural instancing enables artists to generate, animate and render vast amounts of geometry more efficiently.
Below, the Digital Domain character developer provides 10 production-proven tips for using Maya’s XGen instancing framework to create better fur, hair and vegetation. Stefano Giorgetti’s 2013 character FX reel.
0 kommentar(er)
