XGen Overview

XGen is a geometry instancer that lets you populate the surface of polygon meshes with an arbitrary number of primitives either randomly or uniformly placed. XGen lets you procedurally create and style hair, fur and feathers for characters. For set dressing, XGen lets you quickly populate large-scale environments, including grass savannas, forests, rocky landscapes, and debris trails.

With XGen you can:

Instance simple primitive geometry types including splines, spheres, or cards. See Primitive Attributes.
Use brush-based grooming tools to style hair and fur. See Groomable splines.
Populate scenes with archived geometry, such as trees, flowers, and grasses, or other polygon objects from your Maya scenes. See Custom archive primitives.
Control the placement, appearance, and behavior of primitives using PTEX maps, expressions, and attribute sliders. See XGen Workflows.
Interactively preview character grooming and landscape in Viewport 2.0 (or the default scene view) before rendering. See Preview generated primitives and Render Descriptions.

XGen is a plug-in that automatically loads when you start Maya.

NoteIf the XGen plug-in does not appear in the main menu bar, load the xgenToolkit.mll plugin using the Plugin Manager (Load or unload Maya plug-ins .)

To instance geometry on polygon surface, you use:

Descriptions,which specify the primitive properties and how they are controlled.
Collections, which provide a way to organize Descriptions associated with a character or scene.
Patches which define the areas of the polygon surface that generate primitives.

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XGen Overview

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