XGen Maya Hair

The past few weeks I have been looking into XGen for maya properly. As my past experiences with it have either been brief or it's been a nightmare to work with. This is partly to help with look Dev, and being able to take shaders a little bit further with some hair, and the 3rd year project Dino Diner, which may need fur simulations.

I've made good progress with this tutorial. I now feel like I have a good understanding of the grooming tools, and the extra detail that can be added via modifiers, how the groom controls the primitives, and how these get be rendered with custom shaders.
 It was complicated at first getting my head around the texture maps to Ptex conversions but was more simple once I understood what was actually going on and what XGen was actually doing.

I'm pretty happy with the result, I would definitely spend more time on the groom if I were doing this for a project, to get all the hair flowing properly.

 This was rendered in Arnold and the background added in Nuke. The arnold hair shader and setup with XGen was an ok process, I like the look I was able to achieve quickly with Arnold's hair shader.

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 This is an R&D shader for the 3rd year film project Big Top, we are likely going to need lots of realistic looking cloth rendered so I sunk some time into this, and used XGen to enhance the result of the shader. This was set up in Renderman as its what we are hoping to render with for the final production.

I'm pretty happy with it, it's only using a simple maya cloth node to create the bump at the moment, whilst it works ok, I would want to use something more to the style of the film and more art directed for the final shader. This is to clean and perfect. But it gives a good basis of how XGen could help create a nice cloth effect, on top of the shader and painted textures we create.

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