Maya initially started with hair and fur tools that were useful, but a little limiting. Since then, hair and fur tools have grown in another direction, XGen. In conjunction with the sculpting toolset recently introduced into Maya, users have the ability to nondestructively apply changes to XGen hair. This, along with interactive grooming is a leap forward for artists using Maya.
With the launch of Maya 2017, the dev team introduced a new version of XGen allowing users to create hairstyles by interactive grooming. The latest Maya 2017, update 3 has built upon working interactively with some new features to that workflow.
Update 3 added the ability for game artists to groom directly on cards and easily convert those to geometry. This is a huge improvement to the older XGen workflow, letting artists quickly create and groom hair cards for game characters.
Autodesk’s Steven Rosselle walks through some of the changes to interactive grooming in Update 3, showing off the workflows now available for creating game-ready characters. Impressive!
