Render XGen primitives

By default, XGen primitives render with the mental ray for Maya renderer. When you create a Description, Maya automatically assigns the mental ray xgen_hair_physical hair shader to the primitives. For information, see the mental ray Help topic "mental ray XGen hair physical".

You can use other renderers with XGen. See RenderMan DSO.

Set Maya Render Settings

1. In the Maya Render Settings window (Windows > Rendering Editors > Render Settings > Render Using ) set to mental ray.
2. To use motion blur with you render, click the Quality tab and in the Motion Blur section, set Motion Blur to Full.
3. Click Close.

Render Card and Sphere primitives with displacement

When rendering Card or Sphere primitives with displacement, be aware that:

• Using a displacement shader and vector displacement map texture results in the wrong vector values when rendering with mental ray.
• The displacement texture must match the intrinsic UVs of the Sphere (mib_geo_sphere) and Card primitives.

To render Card or Sphere primitives with Displace (displacement)

1. In the xgmr:gen_geo tab of the geometry shader Attribute Editor, increase the Max Displace to an appropriate, high value such as 100.
2. In the XGen Editor, click the Preview/Output tab.

   In the mental ray Approximation Settings section, set Degree to Cubic.

3. Render the Description.

Batch Render Descriptions

1. In the XGen window, click the Preview/Output.
2. In the Output Settings section, set:
   • Operation to Render.
   • Renderer to mental ray.
   • Primitive Bound to 1 or greater than 1.

     For long primitives, set this value higher. If you know the Length of the primitives, set Primitive Bound .

3. In the mental ray Settings section, set Render Mode to Batch Render.
4. (Optional) To render with motion blur, enable it in the Maya Render Settings Window, and set other desired motion blur options.
5. Export the XGen patches for rendering, by selecting File > Export Patches for Batch Render in the XGen Editor.
6. If the patches are animated, turn on Animated and set the Frame Range required for the render.
   Note: If you are rendering with motion blur, set the frame range of the patch export so that it includes the frame before and after the frame range you want to render.
7. Click Export File.

   Maya saves the bound geometry as an Alembic (.abc) file. The file is saved to the set project's scene folder and uses the following file naming conventions:

   _scene name_collection name_plt.abc.

8. Press F6 to switch to the Render menu set then select Render > Batch Render.