The Maya Learning Channel posts an intermediate look at using Maya’s XGen to create and to style hair on a character. They do this with a couple of approaches, one using splines and guide elements in the viewport to control where the hair is moving towards, and the second mouthed shows how to use XGen’s modifiers and utilities to create a hairstyle.
how to use a spline/guide approach to create basic hair using the XGen arbitrary primitive generator.Maya Learning Channel
It was with the release of Autodesk Maya 2014 that we gained the XGen suite of tools. XGen will allow you to instance anything inside of Maya, making it a great tool for “populating” things. Create a forest of trees, instance grass onto terrain, populate rocks, feather-up a bird, or use it to create character hair and fur.
XGen can be a bit of a workhorse as it holds off on loading geometry until it is needed at render time. This can make it easy to work with massively instanced file containing large amounts of model data. The scene will be as responsive during creation or edit as it would be for a normal scene in Maya.
Creating XGen Hair Part 2: Punk hairstyle using Clump Maps and Groomable Splines
Going Further with Maya’s Xgen
There are more creative uses for XGen as we saw with Lee Griggs. Lee offered a look at creating 3D images by using hundred of instanced pieces, and using Iamge Maps to control where XGen placed the primitives. Check out Controlling Maya’s XGen Primitives with a Texture Map here.
There was also an early look at using XGen for creating terrain with building a simple outdoor scene. XGen is used to create a forest, and then shown placing hair on a character’s head. Check out the post Using XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator in Maya 2014 Ext 1 to Create Hair and a Forest of Trees here.
