Pine tree paint fx maya full#
Pine tree paint fx maya free#

Pine tree paint fx maya full#

In general, I like to use a full procedural workflow for instancing short, densely packed objects, like fur and scales, or environments. Although you can switch later, the type of assets you are going to produce will determine the type of workflow you use. When you create a new Description, XGen launches a wizard to guide you through the key decisions. Thinking about how are you going to structure your workflow is paramount to getting work done on time. The sooner you lock this decision, the better able you will be to deal with changes.

Pine tree paint fx maya free#

The base model in the images below is 0a Blonde Girl, a free asset available via TurboSquid.ĭecide early whether you want to use guides to control instanced geometry, or adopt a fully procedural workflow. This isn’t a beginner’s guide, so we’ll be assuming that you already have some familiarity with basic XGen workflows. Although they are all tailored to Maya, they can be considered general guidelines when producing new work using any instancing framework. The following tips are designed to make your workflow more flexible when using XGen in production, enabling you to accommodate the changes that feature work requires. It is essentially an interface to a complex render procedural and can be, in a way, considered a full shading tool. It lets you distribute arbitrary geometry over a surface by means of maps, expressions and guides. As computational power increases, instancing is becoming an increasingly integral part of the surfacing and shading process in modern CG pipelines.ĭeveloped at Walt Disney Animation Studios, and integrated into Maya 2016, XGen is a powerful instancing framework. It is well suited to creating visually complex assets such as fur, hair or feathers, as well as large-scale environments like forests, grassy fields and rocky landscapes. Procedural instancing enables artists to generate, animate and render vast amounts of geometry more efficiently. Below, the Digital Domain character developer provides 10 production-proven tips for using Maya’s XGen instancing framework to create better fur, hair and vegetation. Stefano Giorgetti’s 2013 character FX reel. I prefer the way outlined by Jeramy Cooke, though I usually like to model out my branches and leaves rather than use PaintFX that way you can bake a normal and AO map as well.Posted by Jim Thacker 10 tips for using Maya’s XGen in production Here is an attempt to recreate the tutorial by Jeramy Cooke, I hope he doesn't mind. I thought I would share this technique for making low/med poly trees for games. It should work just as well for high poly trees but it would mean making the initial branch by hand instead of using textured polys. For this step I used Mayas PaintFX but you could paint this by hand as well. Step 2: Create the inital branch structure. This is essentially just a rotated quad with an extra poly pulled out. This structure is great because it gives you good fill and fullness from a lot of directions as well as hinting at the structure of the smaller branches. Lofting is by far the best way to make a low poly trunk as you can very accurately control the number of verts by using multiple cross sections with different numbers of sides. The final benefit is that the lofter will give you a really nice set of UVs that would be a pain to create by hand. One final thing to keep in mind is the locations where you intend branches to sprout off of. Step 4: This is where it gets interesting. Trees are essentially a fractal struture so I set about building it in a fractal way. I take the initial branch and copy it a few times and scale and rotate it to create a cluster of 3 branches. Step 5: I then take that cluster from step 4 and clone it three times at the top of the tree. Then grab the polys from the top of the tree that those branches are attached to and clone off a copy. Step 6: Then repeat steps 4 and 5 until you have a whole tree. You should only have to do this 2 or 3 times till the large branch you have pretty much fills in half the tree. This fractal approach mimics the way a tree grows and is heavily influenced by the shapes you choose for the initial trunk.Īs you can see you end up with a nice full tree for very few polygons.