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ah, well i stand corrected then! most of these scatter plugins that i've looked at, that use instances, seem to not work with maxwell or octance, so i thought that was a common thread there but maybe not. for arnold and vray is there a step where you have to convert the xgen instances to polys before render? curious about the compatibility issue myself now!

For scatter please check this post I made long time a go
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... er#p228425

itsallgoode9 wrote:ah, well i stand corrected then! most of these scatter plugins that i've looked at, that use instances, seem to not work with maxwell or octance, so i thought that was a common thread there but maybe not. for arnold and vray is there a step where you have to convert the xgen instances to polys before render? curious about the compatibility issue myself now!

You can convert instanced Xgen archives to geometry and then work with them just like regular instances. In Preview/Output select "Create MEL file," save the MEL file, then import it into the scene. See http://lesterbanks.com/2014/08/converti ... rves-maya/

dsyee wrote:

itsallgoode9 wrote:ah, well i stand corrected then! most of these scatter plugins that i've looked at, that use instances, seem to not work with maxwell or octance, so i thought that was a common thread there but maybe not. for arnold and vray is there a step where you have to convert the xgen instances to polys before render? curious about the compatibility issue myself now!

You can convert instanced Xgen archives to geometry and then work with them just like regular instances. In Preview/Output select "Create MEL file," save the MEL file, then import it into the scene. See http://lesterbanks.com/2014/08/converti ... rves-maya/

how would you you do this to convert to geometry? Watching through the video he just shows how to do curves in an output. I'm not real familiar with stuff like this so if you can point that out, it'd be helpful.

If you save them as a mel file it gives you curves if you open it. Those can be used with nhair.
Create a temp object to assign the nhair. You only want the hair node the temp object can go afterwards. Then assign the nhair node to the curves you loaded from the mel file.

For other instanced objects like feathers or trees you might be able to create a particle file from xgen and use that to instance your geo.

itsallgoode9 wrote:

dsyee wrote:

itsallgoode9 wrote:ah, well i stand corrected then! most of these scatter plugins that i've looked at, that use instances, seem to not work with maxwell or octance, so i thought that was a common thread there but maybe not. for arnold and vray is there a step where you have to convert the xgen instances to polys before render? curious about the compatibility issue myself now!

You can convert instanced Xgen archives to geometry and then work with them just like regular instances. In Preview/Output select "Create MEL file," save the MEL file, then import it into the scene. See http://lesterbanks.com/2014/08/converti ... rves-maya/

how would you you do this to convert to geometry? Watching through the video he just shows how to do curves in an output. I'm not real familiar with stuff like this so if you can point that out, it'd be helpful.

He's using hair in the video, but it works the same way with instanced geometry. However, it's very slow, at least for me.

I haven't tried it yet, but that sucks to hear it's slow. I bought carbon scatter for maya and you have to go through a conversion process that is very slow in that as well, so it's a bummer to hear this xgen conversion is slow.