From the course: Maya: Natural Environments

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Preparing a scene for XGen

Preparing a scene for XGen - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Natural Environments

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Preparing a scene for XGen

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- [Instructor] Paint Effects is the Maya tool of choice for generating complex geometry, such as plants. Maya's other procedural modeling toolkit, called XGen, has the advantage of much better performance. The power of XGen is its ability to instance large numbers of primitives or even arbitrary mesh shapes. We'll use XGen to populate this landscape with grass, and then art-direct the grass with scripted expressions. XGen is actually two separate toolkits, Interactive Groom and Geometry Instancer. As the name indicates, Interactive Groom is designed for manually styling hair and fur. We'll be using the older Geometry Instancer toolkit, which is more appropriate for a situation like this, where we have a large area to cover and the best way to define parameters is through scripting. XGen instancing is largely topology-dependent, so if we change the polygon structure of the terrain after applying XGen, the instancing may break.…

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