Making Alpha Cards Fast With XGen

hello my name is Charles Mintz the third and today I'll be showing you how to use x-gen to quickly generate alpha cards for realtime game characters hair in the past I think the best way to do it has always been to use hand placing methods for generating cards and indeed there are other ways to do it but I think that x-gen offers a few tools that make this really really simple and easy to do an action in general just seems to speed up the process and after I show you how to do that with x-gen we're going to show you how to get it out of x-gen and to get into actual geometry that you can use in an engine so the first thing that we're going to need to do is we're going to need a head so I've brought in this young boy head and we're going to be using this for our demonstration purposes today in general you're going to want something that has relatively good topology on it just because I'm going to be essentially using the faces here to make a selection of where I want the hair to grow you can indeed just select the head and x-gen will just put everything on it and you can use masking techniques that it gives you to tell it where to grow hair but for our purposes I just think it's a lot less of a headache if you just select the geometry you want so let's just make a quick selection of his scalp they're here they're here okay and that should roughly make for pretty good a layout for a scalp okay now the next thing we need to do is open up x-gen itself now if this is your first time using exchange your first time using it in 2015 which x-gen was fully integrated into if remember correctly it's not going to be up here by default so what we're going to need to do is go to window settings/preferences plugin manager and you would need to scroll to the bottom there's the x-gen plug-in directory there just load load auto load and when you do that you should see it pop up here and it will also plop a directory a tab right there on your shelf so now that we have extra loaded we need to actually open the x-gen window so first thing we're going to need to do is create a new description and this is going to pop up you can actually just leave this all as the default settings if you really want but just fist like very much just name this pou and let's just name this more poo because I have the maturity of a 12 year old so what we're going to do is select grumble splines and as you can see here some of these options become grayed out based on your selection just because certain things are not usable with some of the primitive options that you have I think our impulse line is going to give you the most control in the most bang for your buck so that is what I will be showing in this video there's really nothing to even select after you select removable splines because everything else is grayed out so we're just going to hit create now you notice that it's generated a bunch of pink X's those are essentially one pink X for every face telling X Gen where it can pull it hair and where it can't so you also notice we have these yellowish brown lines and these would look to be cards generating at the top you know so they're constantly moving around and that's because by default these cards will be set to face the camera at all times these splines down here are what we will essentially be grooming with our tools so the first thing we're going to need to do is we're going look under our primitives we're going to return off face camera they notice after I turn it off it's still facing the camera and that's because the way the previewer is set up in terms of the my viewport is you have to tell it to update everything automatically and now that it's done that you notice everything is looking proper so there are a few there's actually one other option we're going to tweak here but we will tweak that later at the appropriate time so what we're going to do is we're now going to look under our grooming tools and we're going to do is we're going to start cranking our density notice that as you crank the density it populates it with more hair in real time you also notice it's also really long so what we're going to do is we're going to start cranking our length down because I want this to be a short hair style keep in mind that because we're going to be using this for alpha card generation that you're actually going to want your cards to be a little bit longer than you might initially think and that's just to leave yourself with enough wiggle room and you're painting the textures that you don't end up getting the textures cut off on the cards so let's just make this an even point - and I actually want the cards to be just a little bit wider it's too wide just make that one five okay and we actually don't need to fiddle with any of those other options up here you're going to find your brushes and these brushes are relatively self-explanatory and I encourage you just to play around with them and see what they do but the main ones that I'm going to be sticking to repose orient and smooth and I'm not actually going to go through the entire grooming process I have a preset that I not a priest that I have one that I've already made from earlier experiments which I'll load up to show you what a finished one might look like but overall it should only take roughly fifteen maybe twenty minutes tops to get everything looking just the way you want to so first we're going to switch the pose brush and what the pose brush is going to allow us to do is to basically start setting the direction that the cards are going to be facing and I'm going to set these cards so they're roughly facing where I would expect the hair to grow the direction I would expect the hair to grow excuse me okay okay switch to the top here and I'm going to get a little bit of a circular pattern here for the crown of the hairs I believe it's called okay so roughly this is how I want it to look and you're actually given a few mirroring tools to quickly generate changes on to another side from one side so Boop notice I would just copied everything that was over there moved it over there so now that the hair is roughly facing where it should be facing we're going to switch the orient tool and we're going to use that to basically brush the hair and I'm just clicking and dragging and you notice the splines are moving in the cards are adjusting after I release the click now at the end of the day these cards will not literally be what we'll be exporting we're going to be exporting when we've got the hair looking good are the splines but this is still a good way to get an idea of your placement and how you want the cards to look in the final output and what we do end up converted when we do end up converting the splines into the actual geometry it'll roughly look like this there'll be a few settings you can tweak here and there but for the most part what you see is what you're going to get when you're all set is set and done so I'm just going to keep clicking clicking clicking clicking clicking now let's say you do this and you realize you might want a bit more coverage you can increase the density but if you do that it will actually reset the positioning and the hair will be sticking out everywhere again you can however increase the length whenever you want and not lose the positioning of the cards and it's the same thing with the width you can may so you can increase the width whenever you want and the cards will keep their position now we're going to switch to the smooth tool and we're going to start smoothing this out and let's actually take the length down a bit more let's try making that one eight and if for any reason the window Priya doesn't update just hit refresh on the I icon there and it will automatically update it again for you sometimes it'll happen I don't really know why but it does and if it does just click that little eye icon now like I said I'm not going to you know go through the entirety of just sitting here grooming just for the sake of time so after you fiddled and played around with things what you should end up with would be something like this now I change the color of the material a little bit but it's the exact same techniques and grooming I also had my density cranked a little bit more here my density was 285 for instance in my length was much much shorter but as you can see that's actually pretty good coverage there are few areas that would need a bit more in terms of cards but we can manually do that after we get the actual geometry from this so we're about ready for export but there are a few things we need to check first and that's mainly going to be the directory that it's going to spit it out in and if we go here we can select a folder for it to export our content out to and what it's going to be exporting are the actual curves which we will then turn into geometry so select our folder x-gen hair and hit select folder and when we hit create mel file it'll spit out a Mel file for us but before we even do that by default modifier CV count is set to 5 and that's going to cause a problem when you actually convert this into geometry because that's going to be you know way more geometry per card then you're actually going to need by dropping it down to 3 and making sure this up here is set to 3 you're going to ensure that you have good enough to keep you know general curve of the card but not so much that it's stupid overkill so now we're going to go under our preview output and we're going to hit create mil file and that will spit out a file now we're going to go make a new scene and we're going to import our file now because this was a premade thing that I did earlier that's why it says description 3 instead of more pou or whatever silly name I picked I'm going to hit open and these are all the curves that were generated from our grooming now when I initially did that grooming for the example that I brought up that was roughly 15 minutes of work so it's like I said before it's really fast to get this done and what we're going to do is we're going to select one curve just as a test curve to begin with just this is just to ensure that we get the proper settings that we want now we're going to need to look under our excuse me rendering times because we're going to want our paint effects menu and I think I may have accidentally clicked my sketchfab export there we go go away so under paint effects there are a few options we're going to want to set up and that's mainly template brush settings now by default our brush width is going to be point zero five which is going to give us a card that I think in general is way too wide I like to keep that at point zero two and that should give you a card that's still wide enough to give you good coverage but not so wide that it's looks ridiculous the most important one though is flatness one if you leave this at zero what you will get will be a tube and unless you're doing dreadlocks you know or unless you're doing a particular hairstyle that needs to but that's going to be overkill if you want to keep it as cards you're going to want to set that at one if you keep it as point five for instance you'll get a squish tube and the higher and lower you go the higher you go the closer we'll get to just flattening out into a card in the lower you go the closer it will get to being a full on tube so I'm going to set this as one because we want cards now what you can do if there are a bunch of different type of styles you can you want to talk try out is under paint effects save brush preset so I'm going to make sure this is set to point two and give it a name the one that I made previously I just named two x-gen hair but you can name it whatever you want for the label and the overlay directory it'll save it to your shelf and you hit save brush preset let me give you an example what that will do I'll put this back at five and I'll put this back at zero and close this is a brush preset that I made previously but when I click it it automatically ensures that these settings are all what I want for the cars I'm going to generate so oops I still had my brush select excuse me we're going to switch to our selection tool we're going to select all of those car curves and we're going to go to paint effects and we're going to go to curve utilities and we're going to go to attach brush to curves notice what I was talking about earlier this is one two three four five divisions roughly for a card which isn't too bad or overkill this line going down the middle just ignore that that's technically just the curve that you're seeing rendering along with the card in the viewport in reality this is just going to be one two three four five cards I mean five quads so ten tries now next I'm going to we're going to want to do is we're going to open up our outliner and we're going to want to go from there and select all of the strokes now we're going to want to go to modify we're going to want to go to convert and we're going to want to convert our paint effects to polygons but before you click that button open up the option and make sure that quad output is checked if you want quads otherwise you're going to end up with triangulated alpha cards if that's okay for you then you don't need to worry about that but personally I like to keep a quantity and we're going to hit apply there we go now notice in here at the bottom these are all grouped I kind of a OCD about keeping everything nice and clean when it comes to my outliner so we're going to go to edit on group and that's the actual geometry now now the rest of this we don't even need anymore so we can trash the strokes and we can Trash the group that the splines came in with okay now we're going to select all the geo and you notice by default it has this black look to it don't freak out that's just because it's using a black material so we're going to go to our hyper shade you're going to assign the default Lambert to it and you notice that it's only applied it to the inside and that's just because in Maya 2015 if we remember correctly it renders of reverse normals as black so if we just hit go back to our polygon menu normals reverse our normals give my time to do as calculations Bibi Boop there we go and there's our hair now it also will make essentially one material group for every single piece of hair that we have so if you like me want to keep things clean after you assign the default Lambert to everything look under edit and you're going to want to delete unused nodes that way when you import it back into whatever you're not going to get a crazy a huge screwed-up hypergraph hypershade excuse me so last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of this mesh well actually before I do that before I forget open up your UV editor and you notice that the UVs for each card are already laid out so that should help when it comes time to actually texture and break these up in individual groups so before I export it I'm just going to merge them all into one piece combined what - calculations beep beep boop then just gonna and delete my history okay and here is our hair and you notice that our triangle count is in just above 4000 which you know for a nice you know next-gen looking character I wouldn't say breaks the bank too much but like I said you can call more faces if you want by deleting them or you can use fewer a smaller density number a next in when you're actually getting it done and then we can just save this out as a regular obj so export selection we're going to name the boy hair save yes and then we can toss it into you know real-time engine like marmoset because it's kick-ass and this is what I brought in before and as you can see that's actually pretty good coverage with some proper hair textures we can have a nice looking head of hair and with a few custom placed cards we can get some nice variety in there that makes everything look amazing so that actually just about wraps it up um hope this helped and thanks very much for your time peace out

Channel: MrHobo87

Views: 16,025

Keywords: maya, xgen, 2015, game, art, alpha, card, hair, real, time, character, Tutorial (Media Genre), how to

Id: QVh1K-RfJHc

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 15 2014