Introduction to XGen - Quick Start Guide

hi this is henning from flick normals in this video we are going to be covering action and the general workflow included in that we'll talk about how to get started with the descriptions collections we'll cover how to actually groom the different splines for cover modifiers and we'll also cover how to render the groom in arnold as well now before we get into the tutorial we have a 12-hour introduction to maya series which you might be interested in we cover everything from the general workflow to modeling deformers rigging retopo uvs bunch of arnold things like lighting and shading we also have a section as well which we cover where we cover how to do this entire project start to finish from the first polygon to the last render including the groom which we do in x-gen limit so if you're interested in learning maya we highly recommend this tutorial for you introduction to maya link in the description before we really get into action there is one thing we really have to talk about and that is that action is the most frustrating tool i've ever used in my entire life and i'm not saying that to just rant i'm saying that because this is going to happen to you as well you're going to experience all the same issues as i am experiencing there are two main reasons why it's frustrating to work with the first one is that it's just really buggy unfortunately there are just a ton of bugs in in action and they're you're gonna experience them all the time the second one is that the ux is a bit clunky the pure user experience might not make a lot of sense it's um it's a plugin that is integrated into maya but it's not like a fully integrated plugin you you're using some old maya tools like the 3d paint tool and then using some cutting edge action tools and combined it's just a bit messy so there are some quirks and we'll of course cover these in this series another warning as well is that for the love of god do not update xgen or maya in the project i'm not talking about upgrading from my 2013 to 20. i'm talking about upgrading from like maya 2020 to my 2020.1 i recently did this and this completely destroyed my old projects like i actually couldn't open the project at all in the new version of it and that was a pure patch fix so make sure that when you start a project with with xgen you do not update it even if it's a service pack action is extremely picky with its project settings you really have to make sure that the project is set beforehand otherwise action literally is not going to work so we do this by going to file set project go to a new directory and then you which where you can set your project then you hit set and you're going to just going to be creating a default workspace then we will go to file project window and accept and if we go to this directory you can now see that we have all the folders needed so that's it for actually setting the project now let's actually get started with action now we are going to be keeping this very simple in this tutorial we're going to be using a sphere and we are just using the default one what's really important before you start with actually assigning stuff to it is that the model has uvs obviously as we're using a generic sphere this already has these uvs which is totally fine but you have to make sure that your model is uv mapped before proceeding from here we will also save the scene as well this is really important i'm not just from like you lose your work but also a lot of stuff in action actually won't work unless the scene is saved so we're just going to be hitting ctrl s scenes and we'll just call this xgen01 so now we are actually ready to get started we will change the workspace from maya classic to xgen here we have a really nice general workflow for for action i will also enable the outliner just so i can drag the outliner all the way over here and then i will also add a tool settings we can just double click on any tool like so to get this up and then we'll just dock this over like so as well you'll be you'll be doing both of these quite a lot so now we have the outliner and we have the tool settings so we can very easily go between these two we'll also name our model and we'll call this hair ball underscore geo and i'm also deleting history on as well shift alt d to delete history so we have a nice clean model save your scene and then we go to the action tab now this looks quite different from all the other tabs you have and here we can create a new description the only button you have to be concerned about is this one create new description when we click it we can make a new description there are a few things in this menu which which is actually important the first one is the description name the description is the specific part of the groom you're working on this could be the hair the eyebrows peach fuss etc so we are going to be naming this hair and we're going to name it underscore description or desk it's really important that you name stuff in xgen otherwise it gets very confused next up we have a collection the collection is the overall project so that could be orc character or car you know if you have a fuzzy car whatever it might be so we're going to be calling this action tutorial and underscore call the reason we are adding underscore call is not just to be fancy it's also so that it's not going to conflict with anything else so if we have underscored desk we know if we have a shader just called hair we we know that there's not going to be any conflict between the two next up we have what kind of primitives do you want to to use or how do you want to control it so we are using splines which is just curves this is really good for anything where you need really fine control like if you're doing long hair next up how do you want to generate the primitives and we want to scatter them randomly across the surface and how do you want to control them we want to place them and by placing and shaping guides this just means that we can now actually use guides to control it so the important ones are name the description name the collection and change the bottom one to placing and shaping guides then we create create now you can see on the left we have an action tutorial under call that's where we name our collection if we open this one up we have the hair description and then we have this is where the the guides are going to be so if we now create some guides we're going to see them popping up under here we create guides by clicking on the plus icon the little the guide icon with the plus or we can do it from the shelf if we switch this to action we can do it from the shelf and click on this guy as well i prefer to do everything within the action shelf itself so we can click on this and now we can click on the model now you can see we have created a guide so we click another one now we can also create another guide and another one if you want to move these guides you can hold on control and middle mouse button and you can just drag them around like so if we want to see the actual groom now we click on the eye you need a certain amount of actual guides in order to see the groom so just add a few guides and if we were to add more guides you can now see that we get more of the we get more groom covering the overall surface so we can just add a few of these just to get some some general coverage what you're seeing though is that these guides are not actually perpendicular to the surface some of these are some of these are and some of these aren't you see like these so what's going on here is that the they're they're being placed based on the interpolation of the other guides so if you have one which is like which is like this and then one which is like this the one in the middle is also going to be like that it's going to interpolate between the surrounding guides it's not going to interpret between these two exactly but it's something like but it's going to interpolate between the guides around it now if we go under the outliner you can see all the guides if you want to delete the guide you can easily do that you can just select it and we can hit delete or you can delete it from the outliner itself if we delete all of them we can easily do that as well and we'll just do that real quick and we can start with cleaner guides so i'm just going to be a bit more methodical about but at this time there are two parts involved in making really good grooms the first part is having really good guides meaning that you place these guides correctly and you were to shape them into something which looks nice and the second part is using modifiers so the better your guides are the easier it is to use modifiers on top of it as well and we'll cover that in a bit but for now let's just add a few guides you want to use as few guides as possible at least in the beginning because it's a lot easier it's like when you're sculpting it's a lot easier to to get the nice shape if you have if you have just a clean mesh so we're going to be starting off with very simple guides if you want to see the hair again we can just click on the icon to see the hair and then if you want to hide it you can click on this icon right next to it if you want to hide the the guides you can also do that you can just click on this icon which has the little illuminati eye right next to it and then we can just click on that and now you can see the guides are disappearing this is really useful later on like once you've done your guide paths you really don't need to go in and see the actual guides the only thing this is doing is just hiding from here so you can also just hide them directly from the outliner so let's add a few more guides and then we can start to shape them a little bit now we're not going to do anything fancy in this tutorial all this is to show you how it works but i'll show you the general workflow so if you want some of them to be longer the easiest way of doing that is to simply just select it and then you scale them up if you want to be shorter we can also scale them down and if you want to have a specific rotation we can also do that as well we can select it use the rotate tool and then we can just rotate them to the direction we want so let's say we want this to be maybe like uh like a hipster ponytail or something like that we can we can do that we can just start to as a preliminary pass we can just start to rotate them and scale them into the the general shape we want so something like that now if you want to deselect something the quickest way of doing that is simply to hit the key alt and d often d just deselects everything you have selected and that becomes very important when we're dealing with grooming now we can really scope the guides using the scope guides tool we find this up here in the interface and it's called scope guides now there is a little annoying thing when it comes to this there is the guy right next to it that is convert primitives to polygons which means that you are converting everything to polygons meaning your groom is pretty much destroyed and they're right next to each other so utter destruction and most useful tool ever so what we'll do is we'll take this guy and we'll just hold down the middle mouse button and we'll just drag him as far as possible so that we're not accidentally going to click on it now we can click on the scope guides tool and now you can see that we like actually start start to sculpt them and this is really useful it's a really good tool and allows you to really quickly sculpt the shapes you want now the reason i talked about the alt d trick before where you can deselect everything is because if you have one selector like this you can only actually work on this one which is really useful in some cases but a lot of times you're also like okay cool now let me select all of them and what you might want to do is select all of them like so in the outliner but this is just messy so a better way is to have nothing selected so if we alt d now now you can see that we can go back and we can actually start to to work with this let's save our scene remember action being action so maybe we can try to do some kind of cool spiraling or something where it spirals in so now we can preview the groom by clicking the eye icon and then we can just hide the guides for now and you can see it not looks nothing like what we want so let's start to cover some of the attributes we have the first one is the density this is set to 1 which is ridiculously low if you want to actually have coverage we have to just set this a lot higher you can see that this goes to max 100 which in most cases really isn't enough so we can just input whatever number we want if we set this to a thousand you can see that the thousand becomes the highest number so the number we input will just become the highest number and we can just slide between it if you want to set this to a million you know go ahead a little tip as well is to in the interface click on this icon here that is going to allow you to have an anti-alias viewport and you can just see how much cleaner everything becomes i'm not sure if you can see it due to the compression but it just becomes a lot nicer to actually look at then we go down just a little bit under primitive attributes here we have the modifier cv count this is this has nothing to do with how many cvs each spline is made out of this becomes very important later on when we deal with modifier like keep in mind notice the name modifier cv count so this is influenced by the modifiers next we have the length you really don't want to start messing with this this should be always set to 1 unless there is some very specific scenario if you want to make the groom longer or shorter you should scale up the guides instead so take all these guys and scale them up and down like so to make the guides to make the groom longer or shorter with though we do have to change this is set to quite a high number so we're gonna have to change this to something a lot lower so something like 0.05 is usually a good number that's really really really a small number but we're just gonna be increasing a little bit for now just we can look at the next settings that is looking at the tapering right now you can see that the the hair strands have a completely uniform length which is not how hair works so we need to start adding some taper and now you can see that this goes from the root and gets thinner and thinner and thinner as we get towards the tip we can also do the taper start which just determines where where does it actually start does it start at the root or does it start later on so a number like 0.8 and 0.8 is usually a good starting point but this just depends a little bit on your on your room if we want to control the amount of segments per guide and not just based on the modifiers if we need actual more control we can do this by selecting one of the guides we see here right mouse button on it control guide points we see we have four points and this means we can get a certain amount of control but we really can't get a whole pound of control like if you're doing something like a really long hair or something like that you just need more control than that so then we can select this one and we can go down to the bottom and guide tools and we can hit rebuild and then we can set this instead of five we can set this to 10. and now you can see if we go into guide points now you see we have 10 points which just gives you a lot more freedom and this of course works with the scope guide tools as well so now we can really just go in and make this guy really be controlled like whatever we want to so four or five points like with the default is pretty low so you generally want more than that as well a little tip as well which i forgot to mention regarding the scope guides tool is that you can change the brush size by holding down the shift key and just dragging up and down or using the b key as well you can also go under tool settings and here you can change it as well sometimes it's set to like a stupidly high or low value and then you're just going to keep on scrolling forever so then you can just manually go in here and set this to a value of something like 50 or you know whatever your scene scale allows for now i'm just going to be adding a few more guides to this so i'm just going to be adding them around the model like so just on the bottom and then we can preview it as well and this is just to show you that there are guides there's hair everywhere now if we want to create a density mask for this we can easily do that that's how we actually control where the groom is going to be and where it's not going to be currently it's just going to be everywhere because we haven't really defined where it's going to be so we can go to the density and then right below it we have mask if we click on this nicely friendly triangle we can go create map and now we can see that we have a map name and this is where we just need to name this we need to just call this density or you know whatever you know just so it just so you know what it is and then we can call this mask this is where action gets a bit quirky because now we're dealing with a map resolution and you're seeing the number five and you don't really understand what's going on because what is the map for resolution of five you know is is due to texture resolution which you normally use to like a 1k map well this is where we're getting into ptex we are now looking at the ptex resolution of five which is a pretty low resolution so if you want to if you really need control you can set this all the way up to something else but for what we're doing now five is totally fine but if you do need very specific control like exact control maybe you're placing eyelashes or eyebrows or something like that you really need to be specific you can set a higher number we can also set a start color and here we can change black white or gray and if you know anything about texturing you can you'll know that if we have a mask which is white everything is visible and we have set to black nothing is visible so if we now hit create nothing is going to actually happen well i just did a little painting before the video but never mind that by default nothing is going to happen because it's all painted with white so what we can do now is we can just start to paint around you can see that it switched to the 3d paint tool and if we were to just hit ctrl 1 for isolate now we can just see that we can just start to paint so if you didn't know maya actually has a texturing tool it's very well hidden because it's not very good but it works for this purpose so now we can just start to paint like so maybe in the beginning you want to have a slightly harder falloff so you might want to switch to this falloff and then you can just really really make hard edges now we're also getting into the one weird quirks in maya because now we're actually painting directly on the model meaning we're painting on the uvs which means that in order for us to save this you know in order to use this for future scenes we have to actually save here first so go all the way down and then it's safe so now we just save the texture map this is an iff map you can see down on the bottom but if you look at the model now at the groom nothing has happened and you're wondering when earth hasn't anything happened i saved my map it's because you haven't saved the ptex right now we only saved the actual texture map so we have to transfer this texturing data on into ptex and we do that by going under this little save icon here as well and now you can see that we are saving and if you have these kind of this kind of issue that's probably because you haven't painted the map perfectly so we can just go in and we can just paint this just the remaining areas just really just go in and just paint these areas out and then we can hit save and save now you can see these are disappearing it's one of these that you did probably do an okay job but it's you're talking that you have some 0.1 values or something it just wasn't full coverage so save and then we hit save and now you can see that we get this map which determines exactly where the groom is regardless of where the guides are so this is really really useful you will be doing using this pretty much for every single groom you're doing so it's very important that you get this right if you want to get more room in certain areas you just change this color to white or you hold on the control key which does the opposite so you hold on control now you can just see that we can paint in here as well then save and then save now you see we get this nice little pocket of groom and then we just keep painting and then we save and we save technically you don't have to keep saving and saving all the time because you you do save this to ptex but it's if you want to keep editing the map later on and particularly before you close down a scene you do have to save so it's just a good hab to get into save and then save somebody can probably make a script which does that as well for you now let's look into region maps as well if we just disable the groom for a second now let's say we want to have like a parting map let's say we want one side of the hair to go one way and one side to go the other way let's just do that real quick if you want really fine control i recommend that you set the brush size really low just hold on the b key or the shift key i prefer b that's just the general myo hotkey so that's just ingrained in me but you know whatever you prefer we can also just add another guide don't be afraid of adding guides to it this is not a problem at all but you can see that they are interpolating based on the ones which are there and the interpolation is purely mathematical which means it's technically correct though it's not artistically correct so you you might get results which actually aren't what you expect but they are mathematically correct this is what what i also mean that action isn't necessarily the most artist-friendly tool because there are a lot of these these quirks where it does what's correct just not what you expect which means it now which also gives us a discussion is that correct or not but that is for another action rant video so now we've done a general parting and now if we were to look at the actual groom you can see that nothing really happened you can see that we get this weird thing in the middle but it's not at all parted so you could of course try to just add a crap ton of guides just to really define that or we can use our region map so if we go down now you can see that we have a region control and region mask so what we'll do is we'll create a map under region and we're doing this the same way as before click the triangle create map and we can call this uh reach and we can call this mask and now instead of having the [Music] black and white we have red green and blue and we can just set this with red and now nothing is happening and that is also because we haven't really set the mask to be enabled so let's just do that and again nothing happened and then we will start to actually paint a region for it now when you're painting this regions map region maps it's really important that you're using a little hardest falloff you can you really don't want any interpolation between the two so go to color and now use one of the default colors i prefer green just to get started with don't pick anything fancy just keep this to a really hard color and then we can just start to paint where you want to be we can also just hide the groom and we can just paint this and then we can save and save save our map here as well and now you can see we actually get the control one now you can see it actually parts it really well so if you want this to go a bit like this you can just do that and then we just hit save and we hit save now you can see we get a really nice controlled region map like this another way of doing this would be to make them actual separate descriptions so you can do hair left and hair right but this way you're getting really nice control like so as a little tip as well if you do have error messages or if you do have weird things happening in action open up the script editor and then you search for like you uh you control c and you just go to google and you just search for these like i said there are probably going to be more weird error messages and weird issues in exchange than any other software so if you do have weird issues i've already had issues throughout this video which i had to just i decided to restart maya if that happens restart maya delete your preferences which you can do by going to documents maya 2020 and preferences and just nuke this entire folder and restart maya again so now we have created this insanely beautiful groom which is very versatile we will look into modifiers as well modifiers live under modifiers and the first one we are going to be looking into is the clumping we can add a modifier by clicking on the plus icon and then clumping and now you get this nice little friendly error message being like hey no clump guides found and my response and that is xgen relax we haven't added any clump guides yet again more ux weirdness because it's it's giving us an error message but we haven't had time to fix what it's complaining about so you will see this every single time you're trying to add a clumping modifier so the way we actually work with clamping modifiers is we go to setup maps on the bottom and now we get up this menu saying create clump maps and if we just hit generate right now you can see that we get very few amount of clumping guides so you see these yellow lines these are clumping guides which means that all the hair is going to clump to them so let's see what happens if we hit save now now you see we get like only a few clumps this is also the time where we need to disable the actual guides because now they are just really annoying so now you can see we only get a few guides set up maps again and this is not the amount of guides we're getting this is um based on a density so it's not like you set this to 10 and then we get 10 guides no this is just a general density amount if you want to be at the exact same spot as a guide stone you can hit guide and now they will be placed at the exact same spot at as your actual guides so this is really handy if you have some kind of stylized character and you really want to control where the guides are or the clumps are so you can just keep going back and forth between the setup maps this is not like a permanent thing you can always just keep re-adding them so let's try with a number something like 20 and then we can hit save and now you can see we get these nice clumps clumping is really the foundation for your modifiers all hair clumps all the time when you start actually observing the hair observing real life reference you're going to see clumping everywhere so now you can also start playing with the settings as well so you can just start to play with the root like so and you can play with a tip like so as well so if you want to clump less you can just set this the tip area to be a lot less sharp it says r for root and t for tip so this is really useful if you just want to almost almost go into like a point at the end but generally this is a pretty good way of working we can also go under noise effects and we can set a noise so we've set this to one and we actually enable some noise in the curve now you can see we get some noise going on and this is where we are starting to have to worry about if we go under primitives scroll all the way up and modify our cv count so if this is set to five it's not going to do a whole lot we set this to 20 and we go back to the modifier and we were to change noise frequency now you can start to see that this matters a lot so if we go back to the primitives and we change the amount from 20 now to 5 you can see that this looks completely different so you need a certain amount of of resolution in your in your actual cv count otherwise it's not going to work so if you set this even higher again you get it just becomes more accurate so you know the higher you go the more accurate you become so but 20 generally okay for us right now we'll go back to modifiers and then you can change this up and down like so you can also change the noise frequency to something like two a lower amount means less breakup higher amount means more breakup so you're going to see the difference between the clumping and without clumping then we can add another clumping you'll often have multiple layers of clamping so we add another one and go to clamping and now again boom we have another red error message which again i said don't worry about it don't google this error message set up maps and now we can set this to something like 30 and we can generate and we can save and now you can see that our clumps are now broken up by smaller clumps this is actually a bit easier to see if we change the amount of density and the width of the hairs so we just can reset the width to something like zero five so now it's a lot lower and we can even set density up to something like two thousand don't be afraid of too high numbers if uh if it goes too high you know if you said like a million that's gonna be insane but something like a thousand ten thousand is totally fine so let's go back to our modifiers and then we go to setup map and we can set this even higher as well we can set this to 50 hit save generate and we hit save and now you can see we get even more breakup and you can just keep going back to this you don't have to this is not a linear process it's not that you do your clumping and in layers and you can never go back if you want to change the amount of initial clumps we can also do that we go to clamping set our maps and we can set this maybe to 30. and we're going to have a lot more clumps and now you can see this also changes as well so this way is a really good way of actually creating a lot of interest within your hair and this is why i said it's a two-part process because first you have to get good guides obviously we didn't and we just did something weird but you really should spend a lot of time just getting good guides and then you use modifiers to break it up so you see from this to this and then even more broken up like so as well and you can even do a third layer of this there's no stopping you in there just go crazy except this to a hundred a thousand just go crazy and have fun and do something which looks nice and it's just a nice way of breaking it up a bit more and then on top of this we can add a noise modifier so we go to add a modifier and then we add noise and now you can see this breaks set up quite a lot now this breaks it up too much for me so we can set the mask to be something like 0.1 and as you can see it's just going to break it up a little 0.5 it's going let's break it up more again and we can set this all the way to one just to go back to where it was now this kills most of your clamping though there you can still see it underneath but you really want to change like the magnitude scale like how how much does it actually do when it comes to the noise and this again is root and tip not a whole lot is going to happen at the root and a lot is going to happen at dip you can also change the frequency as well you set this to 10 and that gives you like this crazy hair or you can set this to one and that gives you less noise but it's a really good idea to break up the noise just to break it up just a little bit like so because otherwise it's just gonna it's just gonna look really it's just gonna look really uniform and not very interesting at all and of course you can keep disabling and enabling these clumps as well so you can just really get this nice break up sometimes you don't necessarily need a whole lot of clumping going on and you can just get this really nice broken up result like this just with a noise we can also change the magnitude amount as well just so it's a bit less in general so just we have a little bit of noise just to break it up one thing as well i forgot to mention is if we go under clamping you can also set color preview so now you can see where each clump actually is which makes it very easy to actually work with this because now you can clearly see where each clump is and how many you have of them and you can see how they're being further broken up like so and once you're done with the clamp you just disable the color preview like so and that is really the core of how to use action in order to create grooms based on this you can create really most things of course there is more complexity there's a lot more complexity in the modifiers and you can have a whole series on each one of them but this is really the essence of that next up we will look into how we can actually render this out using arnold the first thing we have to do is just set up a very quick render environment we're going to go to arnold lights and area light and we're just going to make a really quick light like so make it go a little bit from top like so and then we'll go to the attribute editor and we're just going to set an exposure to something like five and this is pretty much ready for us to render at this point in terms of lighting you know we're not gonna keep this very simple then next up let's go into the arnold render view and let's see what happens now it renders from a perspective and in this case you're like sweet it renders and then you start to compare it and you're like wait a minute this isn't actually the same room we render from the same camera and the party map is the same place but where is this guy and what's going on here and what on earth is going on here so what's happening is that arnold isn't speaking properly with action so we have to set up a few things first so let's just close down our interview and then we have to go under action preview and output and then we have to go to render and set this to arnold now if you have another renderer like vray you just set that here then we go to file and we do export patches for batch render and then we just hit export and then we can try it again and then what we do is we go to render and we do update full scene and sometimes you just have to nudge it around a little bit this is a bit buggy i find to be honest where you just have to go in and do this a few times but the steps are change the renderer to arnold render go to file export patches for batch render and then go to render and update full scene and if that doesn't work restart restart maya and try to play with some other settings like the render percentage and just try to try to force it to refresh the actual render now you can see this looks exactly the same as what we have in the in the viewport but we have a problem that is it still looks kind of crap the shader looks looks pretty good in terms of the viewport and looks okay here but it's not a particularly good shader so what we'll do is we'll assign an actual arnold shader to this which we can do by going to our description select the actual description and then we assign a shader to this the important thing is to assign a shader to the actual description and not to anything else right mouse button assign new material arnold and then we go to ai standard hair and i can see it turns all the way black and we have the air standard here the hair color is controlled through the melanin slider so if this is set to one you get black hair if this is at two zero you get white hair and you can see that if we do anything in between we get different hair colors you can get blonde and you get something more red or or or brown to just something a lot darker and it just goes darker and darker so it's really easy to get very nice appealing hair using this shader simply just change the metal melanin levels up and down and you're almost there in this to get started you can also change the roughness amount to get less or more shiny hair as well so let's just make this blonde and there are charts on this as well you can find online like what hair color does have what melanin levels as well so when it comes to rendering this we're not going to go too deep deep into this but one of the reasons why you have a lot of noise is because you need a lot of specular samples because hair is very specky so make sure to increase the amount of spec samples to get nice and shiny hair so now you can see with changing the specular samples to five instead of two we get much a much much cleaner result though of course it also takes a lot longer to render so that is the end of this x-gen tutorial if you are interested in learning more about maya we highly recommend that you check out our introduction to maya series where we do go through everything about creating this helmet from scratch from really clean modeling like this to going through arnold render settings like we just covered a little bit now with the specular samples to lighting this to shading all different things to re-topologizing to actually going a bit more into action as well so thank you so much for watching and if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe and let us know if you have any cool action tips for us

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Keywords: xgen, learning xgen, Xgen tutorial, hair tutorial maya, how to groom maya, groom maya, groom 3d, XGen, how to use Xgen, Xgen flippednormals, Xgen quick start, xgen intro, introduction to Xgen

Id: rfxt0ubgLXc

Length: 39min 10sec (2350 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020