Redshift Fur Rendering in Maya with Xgen (need help)

junfanbl

Hey everybody, so I have spent a few hours now trying to figure out how to do two different things in Maya 2018, but I have yet to accomplish anything. any help is appreciated.

I have some splines I created in 3DS Max using the hair and Fur modifier. I used the splines for rendering fur in Vray.

Well, I'm using Redshift and Maya's Xgen now. I am trying to use the existing splines from Hair and Fur modifier in Xgen so I don't have to re-groom the model. Anyway to get the splines into Maya, I converted them into Curves in 3DS Max and then imported them into Maya so I can use them in Xgen. 

I use Xgen to convert the curves into hair guides and it seems to work fine until I go to render the fur in Redshift (or any other renderer for that matter). The fur does not render. I applied a Redshift hair shader to the guides, but they just won't render. 

And secondly) For the fur color in Redshift, I'd like to use the texture map I made for the model. However I don't know how to apply my texture map to the hair shader for redshift.

Any ideas?

oglu

there are tutorials for exact that on youtube... 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Uwoudc9VCs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT-GS4wLFsU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIyaqbYXWqY

junfanbl

Hey Thanks for posting those. I did already watch these videos though. I watched some of them again to make sure I didn't miss anything. I can't tell what I am doing wrong. What I'm doing differently from the tutorials you posted is I am using pre-existing curves that I imported into Maya. I use Xgens Curves to Guides utility to convert them into guides that Xgen can use. All of that works just fine. However after applying the Redshift hair shader the fur does not render.

I did notice that after converting the curves into guides using the Curve to Guides utility that each guide was it's own object in the Maya outliner. So underneath the Xgen Parent collection there were 11,000 individual guides. Whereas if you created a new Xgen collection the guides are all one object in the outliner. I don't see why that would make a difference, but maybe it does.

Anyway, if I have to re-groom the fox I will, I was just wondering if there was a way to use my existing work.

Thanks!

Axi5

I just came across this while reading the Maya 2018.2 update notes:

If your previously exported XGen archives do not render properly with Arnold for Maya, you can workaround this issue by enabling the "Export Shading Engine (Legacy)" option in the Arnold Render Settings > System tab.

This issue may occur because MtoA always used to export a Maya-specific MayashadingEngine at the root of all shading trees, but no longer does so in MtoA 2.1.0.1, which is provided with Maya 2018.2 Update. This change has the advantage of decreasing the number of shader nodes in a scene, and also makes it easier to render .ass files exported from Maya.

Maybe try the workaround they mention?

Ahh it was late when I sent this last night and I realise now that it's Arnold specific. The way I read it was that maya wasn't sending the correct data to Arnold. Ah well, I hope it helps someone

thiccPanda

for anyone searching about how to apply a texture file to the fur color, this video is the solution!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8raBYx1hdew