Fast Fur Guide Placement - Maya/Xgen
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 พ.ค. 2020
- Timelapse + Tutorial
A quick way to place fur groom guides in Maya. This method is not often discussed but it has helped me out a lot recently so I thought to share. It's inspired from a blender tutorial by Nazar Noschenko.
Zootopia wolf concept art by Borja Montoro.
This is amazing ....I was bored watching 3-4 hours long tutorials......and then I came through this.....fast, easy ,to the point
Man a bunch of these tutorial out there are regarding hair/fur are sometimes 30+ mins long and this guy manages to sum up a lot in 12. Thank u sir!
No problem. Thank you :D
Thank you very much. I really appreciate people that share tips you have learned.
I love the 'easy alternative' tutorials like this one. Do make more! :)
This is the best video on this topic I’ve watched yet thank you so much
Amazing stuff. Thanks so much for sharing with the rest of us and helping us stand on the shoulders of giants
thanks for making this video !!! WOW no more struggling with guides sculpting
This is fantastic, thank you for sharing!
I'm definitely using this method from now on. Thanks
Thank you! Very thorough and easy to follow!
I am moving to Maya from Blender and this is massively helpful. Thank you!
Same
this is a really good way to creat fur , thank you for your sharing!
So helpful. Thanks Omar!!
thats pretty cool! will need to try out this method at some point
Incredibly helpful! Thank you so much for making this tutorial.
Really useful video, thanks a lot!
Brilliant!
Thanx for this amazing tutorial!
masterclass man!! thanks!
Thanks for sharing this video.. It is amazing !!
very nice tutorial ! thx for your sharing!
great tutorial!
Thanks was looking for this!!
It's such a talented way to create guides for fur or hair! Thank you so much for sharing this technique!
Thank you very much! Glad you found it useful.
Dude you're the best
thank you for the video. just a quick question - every time i paint a stroke previous ones disappear in the preview (still exist in the outliner) i can only see all the strokes when i select them. so how can i see all the strokes without selecting them?
Sounds like a bug, or maybe your mesh doesnt have UVs which the drawn paint stroke rely on or you have some curves in isolate mode. Get out of isolate mode if that is the case, make sure the scalp mesh has UVs, and delete history and freeze transformations on everything.
Thank you brother, nice video, hug from Portugal
Hi i'd like to know how to reduce the thickness of the guides in the viewport, if i need some thin guides in little area space. Thank you.
Sure! You can select those guides and then go to the channel box and in the width you can change the number there and it will apply that to the multiple selected guides. Note that the attribute editor width number only affects one guide, in the channel box you can control multiple selected.
Hey Omar, this is a great technique, thanks for sharing it, i am gonna try for my next artwork
Thanks Rohit! Happy you found it interesting. Keep kicking ass man! I always look forward to your incredible work.
Omar Hesham thanks man
Thank you, this is a really valuable and well explained workflow.
came to skim through your work, stayed for the music
is ther a way to transfer xgen animation to other software through alembic ?
It's possible but very heavy to export the actual groom as alembic animation.
You can maybe cache it out as aiStandin in Arnold and render it in another software that supports Arnold.
What is The Hotkey that you were used for isolate the curves from Group?
It's ctrl+1. Also you can click the arrow and green box icon next to the gamma controls in the viewport.
is there a way to make the fur not grow on certain areas of the object? to use this technic in a single object scuptures od a wolf without letting the fur grow on the nose eyes and othes places?
Yes it is possible via density map painting. You can check tutorials on TH-cam by Jesus Fernandez on this topic.
When I do control G it just groups the groups into one, I don’t get left with dummy groups like you did! Am I doing something wrong? Thank you!
Hi! So what I did was select those groups initially and they had the curves in them. Then I isolated (ctrl+1), then selected the curves in the viewport, then grouped them. That essentially moved them out of the dummy group and into a new group. The trick is to select the curves themselves before grouping them and not their own parent/dummy group that we need to throw away. Hope that helps.
i am doing the sam exact thing on sphere but when i convert them into the curves it just creates the cruves but all the curves are invisibile
Make sure you are not in isolate mode and also make sure the viewport display options show Nurbs Curves
How to bake the maps for all the surface for my game engine? I know how to do it for the card of hairs, here we have to make maps for each hairline or what is your offer?
This is for rendering and not for game art. For game you would need to do the card based approach yes.
aAAAAAAAAAAAAAMAAAZING!
Omg this is so sick
Wow, Thanks for share :)
Omar sometimes xgen works and renders, other times its not there, as in nothing in the render tab where it should have Arnold...do you know why it plays up like this. really puttee off using it. thanks
hmm weird. Never had this. Try to see if the Arnold plugin is set to autostart with Maya. In the plugin manager make sure mtoa is set to autostart and is loaded.
If it turns off within the same session Im not sure what that means.
nó thật hữu ích, anh hãy làm nhiều video như thế này nhé, nếu có thời gian, rất cảm ơn!
It's so useful, please make many videos like this, if you have time, many thanks!
thank you great wrokflow
well done bro.......
thanks bro , it helped me today XD
Haha that's awesome man! Small world :D Glad it was useful
Thank you so much for this tutorial, but I have a some problem with selection first point in curves, I tap on select >first CV and then Maya chooses all point in curve. I don't know why its happened, mayby you will help me ?
No problem! and try that again but check soft select is disabled.
MashAllah this is awesome.
cool. thanks
Is there a way to scale the xgen along with the rig character? seems that the "xgGuides" are not able to follow the rig structrure whe you try to scale the character
It's not recommended to groom on a rig. You should be creating Xgen on a static model and then applying animation alembic cache to the static model which will drag the hair with it from the scalp. Or you can add the groom to the animation alembic by making sure the animated alembic starts in the same neutral pose you created the groom in on the static model. There are many ways to attach animation to groom or groom to animation, but doing it on the rig will cause some problems so should be avoided.
@@OmarHesham thanks for the advice man! alembic solution sounds great!
Hello! This is a great tutorial 🙂 I have a quick question though. What if the mesh I am working needs to have a texture? Will the fur adapt to the colour of the texture assigned on the mesh?
Thanks! Yeah you can have the texture drive the full color. There are a few tutorials on youtube for this.
Awesome tutorial, couple of questions:
First: Would this method work for once you finish grooming in Xgen, you can convert the fur into Alembic for Unreal engine?
Second: Is there any specific workflow to blend very short fur on a character (the face for example) to long fur around the neck like in your tutorial? (What I mean is, if there's any thing that should be known for controlling the length of fur on specific areas)
Thank you!
Thanks!
1- Yes you can export it as an alembic for Unreal. You convert the Xgen core groom into an Xgen interactive groom via the generate menu. Then follow the Unreal guide on Epic's site to export that for Unreal.
2- For Short fur you can use shorter guides the gradually get shorter towards the face so you can control them easier then you couple that with a painted length map to blend from longer areas on the neck and into the shorter fur on the face.
After I create all curves when I create the Description my utilities in xGen is blank!!! no icons showing . Any help anybody, please?
I myself found the solution too.... just in case anybody facing the same issue please watch this : th-cam.com/video/B26JHesiflI/w-d-xo.html ......Autodesk seriously???
can i convert this to cards
There are some ways to do it yes. Not the final hair system, but the guides curves themselves can be turned into cards with bonus tools curve to ribbon mesh option. There are some tutorials out there.
Very helpful! Thank you, is it possible to use the interactive grooming tools with this technique?
Thanks! Yeah you can feed those curves back into interactive grooming tools within the guides modifier which lets you convert nurbs curves to guides.
@@OmarHesham thank you !
Great tutorial, however when I click generate preview nothing happens? I've been looking for a solution for hours but no luck. please help!
Thank you! If nothing happens means you have either only one guide (needs at least two to show hairs), or your density is very low (try increasing it).
Ei Omar, do you know how to make this hair preview appear ? It appears some wireframe mode grids when I click on the "eye" to preview
Try unhiding the description and collection from the outliner. Also increase the density and add guides.
@@OmarHesham Ty, I realize what happened. I didnt save it on project set, but after finish it I have another issue.
How to make xgen to create normals to the right side? seems that some cards are not faced correctly
@@pavinivfx If you're making cards check out this video. It requires using the twist brush to align to the normals of the surface after you convert the xgen groom to interactive xgen.
knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-CharEffEnvBuild/files/GUID-2CFBC23D-358F-4EDF-B51D-94796DFC2201-htm.html
I still don't understand how someone didn't make something more artist appealing or user friendly piece of software for hair fur, xgen gives you nice results but it's absolutely awful and tedious (not not mention unstable) in every aspect
It is really unstable for sure. Also very inconvenient having to write or hunt down expressions to make basic noise and percentage functions work that should be built into it.
That being said I enjoy making and brushing guides in it. Works well.
@@OmarHesham do you have some you can share?
@@Slouworker Sorry for the delay. Sure! Check Jesus Hernandez's tutorials on youtube. He covers expressions and shared some on his website too.
It seems like this technique would be useful for creating hair in general. Or do you not recommend for human hair?
Yeah totally if the hair is short enough or some parts of it are close to the scalp then it will work great. Although with long human hair you would have to create a proxy mesh in order to draw those curves on. So the paintFX strokes have a surface to snap to. In that case I would personally choose to just convert that long hair proxy mesh into poly tubes (Zremesher) then convert those tube edge loops to nurbs curves. Depending on the situation either method can work.
Any reason why it has to be Uved??
To paint density maps or region maps on it later in Xgen if needed. (not shown in video)
Just a rule for all grooming.
Thx man
hi,i need you help.i create guide on the scalpe and when i generate the vizualization from hair the xgen is creating hair inside the mesh ,the same ay when i create the spline to convert to guide the xgen is creating hair inside the mesh,i am face this big problem all time i use xgen.hy this is happening?when i create guide one by one happen the same problem and the hair scale automatically.
You probably need more guides and arrange them in a way so the interpolation between them doesn't cause the hair to go into the scalp.
ok,thak you,but if i sculpt spline to convert to guide is the same procedures?because sculpting with spline happen the same problem.thank you for orientation
How many polygons each hair is?
No polygons. This is a a groom made out of curves generated by Xgen. It can be converted to polygons later, but this is curves for offline rendering. Arnold/Vray etc. Not for games.
Hi, im new in maya so i want to ask you some questions. What is the tool to draw de lines? after, how did you convert them in guides? I appreciate your time and work. Thanks
Thanks! As shown in the video I used the paint effects tool to draw then converted those strokes to nurbs curves. Then in xgen under utilities I use the curves to guides option to convert them to guides. All covered in the video. Good luck!
@@OmarHesham Thanks, this process could be use to make woman hair too?
@@emiliocampana1 No problem. I wouldn't recommend using this for longer hair since it's just easier to create longer hair with traditional guides. Drawing guides directly on the surface is only useful to quickly establish flow for short fur. If you're doing long hair, I'd recommend extracting curves from geometry tubes or placing them and styling them manually.
Wow! Amazing! But my Utility window is empty. Can anybody tell why?
Thanks! I had this issue before. I found on the forums that there was a typo from autodesk in the actual xgen script that needed to be fixed lol.
I forgot how to get to that solution page but if you google around you will probably find it and solve it the same way I did. I think it was something to do with editing the typo out and that makes it show up/.
This is a really good tutorial. Can you do one explaining more the modifiers please? Thanks!!!
Thanks! You can check the great xgen tutorials by
Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam. Learned a lot about those from him.
@@OmarHesham will do!
Can we get the preset file?
It's just a saved description with a bunch of basic modifiers applied. You can learn to create them from tutorials by Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam.
Amazing stuff, do you perhaps have a good resource for how to achieve a nice fur groom using using the modifiers in XGen, similiar to the preset you imported / made?
Thank you! I recommend tutorials from Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam. He shares basic logic of the modifiers and also how to use Xgen expressions to create certain effects like the cut modifier cut by random by length. He has a blog too I believe where this is documented.
@@OmarHesham Ooooh! Thank you a lot!
can someone please help me? When I try to convert the curves to guides, it doen't work, the guides are huge and they don''t follow the flow of the curves
Your object scale may be off, try using real world units and scale to the approximate size of a human head
on 0:22 how u do that?
It's covered in the rest of the video starting at 4:12
Hello, I’m dealing with a problem, I don’t know how to render out my scene with SEL automatically , i’ve got about 1000 scenes. Could you teach me how to solve this?
Sorry dont understand the issue
how to draw on objects the curves
Paint effects tool
Nice tutorial, thanks! Whats the track playing in the beginning?
La Nights (Timecop 1983)
@@milty66 thank you sir!
please give us description file for practice
You can learn the details of how to create it from Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam.
The fur is only showing on render view not in viewport... How can i fix that
It was probably set to 0% in viewport in the preview tab in Xgen.
okay I was able to follow along but didn't understand how you isolated the "curves" around 4:29 what exactly did you do?
oh there I just selected all curves normally without the mesh selected then ctrl+G to group them.
If you mean isolation. You can isolate with ctrl+1 or clicking the arrow with the green dotted box next to the sRGB color menu area of the viewport.
@@OmarHesham thank you very much for the reply 😊
Pls explain preset discription...u apply in the video..... Because it is very... smooth feel.... for me it was not coming..
It was just clumping by guide, then normal clumping with a lot of points, then noise, then cut with random expression. You can learn all about this from the great xgen tutorials by
Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam. Learned a lot about those from him.
why is it when I draw the curves with the paintfx tool it does not show up in my viewport as I draw them, but I see it the curves listed in the outliner and shows up on my viewport only when it is selected?
Maybe you are in isolate mode. Try leaving it, ctrl+1
@@OmarHesham I made sure I wasn't it isolate selected, but those curves still don't show in my viewport since they appear to be transparent(meaning they only show in wireframe mode), but under my paint fx brush it is not painting with transparency mode on under its pressure settings, but it is on "scale" or "off"
@@OmarHesham also is there any way to use the sculpt guides tool with a zbrush "mask topological/polygroup" option, that way you can brute force the program into only dragging one guide as opposed to multiple ones while you are styling them. The other problem I ran into is why is it I can select some guides but others I am unable to using the select tool(but they are selectable in the outliner), I don't even have them on separate layers?
Also is there any way to shorten the guides instead of lengthening them?
@@justinyuvilla8944 Hey sorry dont know how to fix that stroke visibility issue you are having. Maybe your viewport display settings have stroke display disabled try looking into that. The same play you display all polygons or nurbs curvs etc.
As for moving guide selectively like move topological. There is no way to do it with the sculpt guides tool. There is no way to control surface or volume with that xgen guide sculpt brush. You can just select each manually and do one at a time. Yeah not ideal but only way to do it as far as I know.
And for shortening guides, you can scale them down with the scale tool. If you want to cut points, you can hold right click. go to cv mode and delete some cvs to cut the guide.
Great tutorial bro! Btw what is the system requirements for this kind of fur quality?
Thank you! I think an average gaming computer can get what's seen in this video and with this density. Although when working on the full body fur with full coverage it can be very dense and slow if working on an older GPU. I would recommend any of the modern 30 series nvidia cards or higher.
great tutorial! where are the presets of the modifiers?
Thanks! It was just a saved descriptions I made earlier with modifiers and settings I liked. You can learn to do your own via expressions from Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam and from his website.
this is really awesome! the outcome is so cool. I was wondering, is this process applicable to games? how to optimise it, like with cards? thank you very much!
Thanks! You can use this same method with Xgen core to generate wide non tapering hairs at guide locations. Guide locations is an option in Xgen. So it will create one wide flat non tapering hair per guide and follows it exactly. Then after you are done you can convert the Xgen core description to Xgen interactive. Then on the new interactive description turn off face camera. Then use the twist brush to flood the whole groom so that all the cards now face the body mesh. Then convert that Xgen interactive groom to polygons under the generate menu. It will also create the UVs for those cards and you can start applying hair textures to them.
I plan on making a video detailing this process soon.
@@OmarHesham thank you very much for the reply! can't wait to see the video
This is a great video. I use this technique. But I noticed on my curves, that some how I get Maya all versions I have used into a mode so that the little box around a point on a curve is no longer yellow, but it is gray, and I therefore can't set the pivot point to the first point. The only way to get out of this is to reset my prefs for Maya. Can anyone please help me figure out what is going on. Thanks.
Thanks! and try switching the viewport from OpenGL to DirectX and see if that helps.
@@OmarHesham I'll give it a try. Thanks.
I tried this but the CVS arent picking up. Has anyone else had an issue with this
Picking up how?
could you share the preset?
You can learn the details of how to create it from Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam.
why xgen cant showed in redering arnold
Change the output to Arnold in the xgen preview/render tab.
شكرا
Great tutorial! Sadly my Maya crashes so many times everytime I try to play with Xgen. It's so frustrating..
I have good enough PC I'm pretty sure. RTX 3070 16GB Ram. Don't know why it keeps crashing
probably need more RAM. Xgen eats 16 GB in no time. I also have an RTX 3070 and 16 GB of RAM, and my Maya runs out of RAM every time I try to generate a clump map from too many guides
Thansk. When I select all curves, Isolate, then select First CV. they all turn yell and I see the box on the first CV. but when I then go to Modify, Center Pivot, its does not center the pivot to the CV. its still in the middle of the curve...? hmm. When I select First CV all full curves turn yellow, with cv dots. and yellow box. In yours Only the Box, first CV gets selected.
hmm That is probably soft select being enabled. Press B to disable soft select and try it again. I think it is currently turning yellow because of it and the bounding box of where the pivot will be centered is now larger due to the soft select fall off.
@@OmarHesham I’ll try that soon, when home. Thank you for your help.
@@OmarHesham yes!!! You are right. So happy to hear this! Now I can continue with this great tutorial! I was so down, I’m a newbie to Maya. Lol. So I thought B, was to change brush size.
@@OmarHesham quick question. I grouped the hairs and the head (in doing a head) is in another group. Each time I go to select the hairs it’s selects both head too. I have to deselect the head by holding control click. I’d like to keep the head visible and not grab it each time. Is there a way to lock it or something? Thanks!!!!!
@@BrianLife Great! Happy to help. Yes holding B and click dragging does change the brush size, pressing it turns soft select on and of. Glad that was it.
As for locking, I am not sure there is a way to exclude it from selection. Try just taking the head out of the curves group. Middle mouse dragging it out of the group. Now when you select the group, only the curves will be selected.
Whered u get this tool in the 0:00
00? You mean paint effects tool? It's under generate menu.
while i m painting my stroke is on grid, how can i paint it on object pls help.
@@OmarHesham
@@pratik_vishwakarma In the generate menu with the mesh selected use the 'make mesh paintable' option.
3:40 draw all the curves in the same direction (top down)
I got lost on the Clumping preset part. that was fast. I do not have saved presets, when i make a clump modifier, its says no guild, can you help me with this?
It was just a previous description I had made before and reimported. You can learn about the full process of xgen grooming from Jesus Fernandez here on TH-cam in many detailed videos. Highly recommend his stuff.
How did you transfer your guild to the preset? Ive followed along well so far, damn. ..Im totally confused.... I tried Copy Guild Past, but it does not work?
@@BrianLife I converted them to curves then I imported a previously made description (cooking show style lol) and I called it a preset. But it was just another description I had made before using techniques I learned from the recommended channel before.
Then I converted the curves to guides again but now inside the new description. Then deleted the empty one.
The convert to curves and convert to guides options exist in the utilities tab.
@@OmarHesham thanks, Sorry to ask so many questions, I know it would be better if I new xgen basics. Since this is a tutorial, Maybe you could write in the tile: for moderate xgen users. I just don’t want to be a bother But, I do appreciate your responses and help. I’ll look into Jesus Fernandez. I do wonder why you turned all the curves to guilds the first time, then made a description? To then import a new description/preset to then convert back to curves and back to guilds again. Maybe I missed something? Wouldn’t you just want to leave the original curves. Open xgen, import preset description, then go ahead with the utility convert to guilds? Or was it because you wanted to add some extra guilds first?..get it all right before you transferred them to the more complex description?
@@BrianLife Well this short tutorial was definitely not going to cover the entire groom process. It should not need clarifying in the title. Don't know why you'd assume it would cover everything. It's clearly titled describing guide placement. The rest you bring from other resources. Glad you will be looking into Jesus Fernandez's tutorials.
Glad to answer your questions.
I did do curves to guides initially just to show it. But yes it was redundant to just do that again off screen with the newly imported description. Just edited that part out. There was no reason to do that two times for sure. I should have added them to the final premade description in the first go. That's just an error with the video editing that should not affect your workflow.
Yeah you could just covert the curves to guides directly into the right description that has all the modifiers already added. There was no benefit to starting with a more simpler one and then converting into the imported complex one.
This is really a very good tutorial, but the trouble is the parameters of the modifier, could you please give me some parameters, I can't do better myself
Thanks! You can check out TH-cam tutorials by Jesus Hernandez for all the details on Xgen modifiers.
And can we get the preset uwu?
It's just a saved description with a bunch of basic modifiers applied. You can learn to create them from tutorials by Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam.
Mine it doesnt stick to the mesh, and the lines are to thick not sure why.
You have to set the mesh as paintable and disable draw as mesh. Shown in the video.
@@OmarHesham it worked but now the curves guides are to thick as well, and there isn't enough hair once I max out to 100% on density 🙄
@@MrYuzuro Cool! and you are probably working at a very tiny scale. Always check your scale is reasonable to real world scale. That way the guide width and the xgen density will behave as expected without having to go up in values too much. For now though you can select all your guides an in the channel box change their width all at once.
@@OmarHesham its fine now ! i did increase the hair up to 200% but my machine won't handle it lul. Thank you for helping !
How could I reproduct your fur ? :o
You can learn to create a similar look from tutorials by Jesus Fernandez on TH-cam. I recommend it.
why i cant to centerpivot to first cv,
when i select > First CV they selected cv piont r all gray
who can help me pls
have z same issue and i think the problem of how isolated the curves
@@ahmedelsisi3563tks
i know the reson now its because of i open the instance
@@user-el3pb5wj3s what do you mean by the instance? Because I have to select all z curves
@@ahmedelsisi3563 it couldnt work when symmtry function is on
can u understand this time
@@user-el3pb5wj3s yes bro thank you so much,, will turned it off n tell you z result, Thank you so much bro
Hey Omar. Great tutorial. I really enjoyed watching you workflow. I’m curious to know if you ran into issues with the amount of max fur density you can have in your viewport and if you knew what the hardware limit would be? Is XGen more CPU dependent when generating fur in the viewport?
Sorry for the late reply. I think the viewport Xgen runs on GPU, so it all comes down to how much GPU memory your card has. In the preview tab in Xgen you can temporarily reduce the amount of hair it draws in the viewport by a certain percentage.
@@OmarHesham Thanks!
does anyone know why my pivots won't center at my CVS?
Probably you have soft select enabled. Disable that and try center pivot with first CVs selected.
@@OmarHesham still doesnt work my pivot stays at the center of my scene
@@aoneal It wont move there immediately visually after centering the pivot, but only after you select the curve again it will appear at the correct place at the position of the first selected CV.
@@OmarHesham I’ve tried de selecting but it still dosen’t position the pivot to the first cv, is it a version problem? I’m working on maya 2025 and it’s not working, im only asking because in the video it’s 2020 version
wakanda bullshit is this? idk making fur monster is this easy, if i know about this earlier, i wont make something as easy as rock monster