Here I´m posting the latest developments which I also posted on youtube related to my battle with XGen! : D

I started all over again and I have now saved and opened my file a few times and it is rendering properly so far, so I hope Maya will be nice to me and will keep rendering as I try to improve my hairstyle : )

Just wanted to show you and everyone else who might be interested how I´m playing with Xgen.

I´d also love to see what other people are doing with Xgen since there´s not much stuff out there yet so to anyone who might be reading this and is playing with Xgen, send me a link to what you´re doing with it! I´d love to see that.

I am especially interested in character hair creation but I´ll be excited to check out anything and everything else : )

Now to my hairstyle. It doesn´t look very good but it´s a start.

Here are two quick renders - http://s30.postimg.org/n05xjrvkh/Untitled.png

And here´s the guide placement - http://s23.postimg.org/8yhriyjnd/image.png

I think I am still not placing the guides the right way. I started from the bottom of the scalp when populating it with guides to make sure there are no bald spots and went up to the top and I did not really have any bald spots except for the in the front you can see in the picture on the right.

The absolute disaster however are the ends of the hair that look really spiky and chopped.

I added a clumping modifier thinking it would kind of soften the ends but as you can see it didn´t.

I think this might be because the guides that are lying on the shoulders are pretty straight and do not have that many curve points and were placed by hand to appear as if the hair was softly lying on the figure which it really doesn´t and that brings me to another thing.

The hair penetrating the figure. I know that in the tutorial, this was fixed when the head was being animated but is there really a way to make the hair primitives recognize that they should collide with a static figure mesh that is not being animated yet?

I tried adding the collision modifier and using a cache I created by exporting my static mesh but this didn´t do the trick.

Ideally the best way to get the most real looking static shape of the hairstyle would be if I could somehow run a short simulation of the guides and their primitives reacting to gravity and colliding with the mesh so they´d "drape" over the body´s surface nicely within a short period of time.

Can this be done with Xgen?

I have looked at the modifiers and the "Force" and "Directional force" ones looked like a way to go.

So I looked them up and it says that the Force modifier applies a force along the X, Y, and Z axis. By default, Force is set to -1 along the Y axis to act as a gravity force.

Which is exactly what I´d need but I got a lot of errors (probably one error per guide it seemed : D ) after applying the modifier saying // Error: XGen:  No pipe data is found with the name fxNetForce.  //// Press the ESC key to stop playback.

But that doesn´t matter now as I still need the primitives to collide with the mesh first before I can add gravity o them.

Now back to the shape. A few days ago I saw a method of XGen primitives being generated from polygon tubes and it seemed that this way can give some nice looking results after adding a few modifiers.

I had originally wanted my hair in the front to be two braids but I figured I´d probably not be able to braid the guides so I didn´t really go for it but, if I were attempting to create a long braided tail, using the tube grooming method sounds like the best way to go, doesnt it?

Also today when googling Xgen, I found this - http://beccajbaldwin.com/?p=67

Although it´s not a braided tail, the results with the tube grooming method look pretty great.

In the article it says that the hairstyle was created using this method but it looks to me that the hair on the scalp was created by regular placing and shaping of the guides while the ponytail was created with the tube grooming but I´m not sure.

I might try to recreate this hairstyle as an exercise and see what I can come up with.

Anyways, any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you and have a wonderful day : )