XGen hair on alembic

#1

Hi,

I’ve been trying to add some XGen hair on a character I animated in Softimage.

I import the Alembic file, add a new XGen description with splines, and shape guides to my mesh.
And I then convert the animated Alembic splines I exported from Softimage with the character, to guides and create some hair primitives.

Everything seems okay so far, and when I scrub the timeline the hair moves with the character. But when I then batch render the animation ( using Redshift ), the XGen hair and the mesh it’s attached to are not deformed. It just renders the pose from the start of the animation for every frame. With or without motion blur and no dynamics are involved.
Also after trying to batch render, the hair and mesh no longer deform in the viewport when I scrub the timeline.

I also tried creating new guides instead of using the ones coming from Softimage, or creating a blendshape, and attaching the hair to that.
But matter what I try, I can’t seem to render hair that is attached to an animated Alembic mesh. A mesh that is deformed by a lattice or some bones works just fine.

Is there some secret trickery involved I should know about to get this working ?

I’m using Maya 2018.

Thanks,

  • Ronald
#2

have you done the export for batch.?

#3

Hey thanks.

Yep, I tried exporting the Patches for Batch Rendering. But even while exporting the character and the hair don’t move.

#4

Just in case someone else runs into something similar.

Seems like XGen is not compatible with namespaces and Redshift materials. As soon As I rename the Alembic meshes and use a lambert shader it kind of worked…for a short time that is. Just to stop working all of a sudden after batch rendering a few frames or scrubbing the timeline.

Then the character and the hair stop moving and I have to quit and restart Maya to get it working again.

Also, hiding an XGen description, either by isolating in the viewport, or in the outliner, has no to effect on playback speed whatsoever. Is that normal ?

Maya, what a mess…:-/

Thanks,

  • Ronald