XGen Descriptions store settings for positioning, generating, and rendering primitives. Each Description controls primitives on the selected faces of the mesh surface, which are called XGen patches. You can add any number of Descriptions to a polygon mesh. Descriptions are contained by and organized in Collections.
In an XGen workflow, you can create Descriptions to populate and groom each region of a character's hair, such as the sideburns, scalp area, beard, or eyebrows. When creating vegetation landscape, you can use different Descriptions to generate each type of grass, tree, flower, or plant. In the
Outliner, Descriptions appear with this icon:
When you create an XGen Description, you can select the kind of primitives you want to generate on the surface, how the primitives are generated, and how you control the primitive properties. You can edit the settings contained by a Description in the XGen Editor.
Do not group XGen Collections with Maya objects, such as the Description's bound mesh. XGen already uses the worldspace transform values from the bound mesh object. If you group the Collection with the mesh, XGen uses the wrong transform values and causes it to behave incorrectly.
You can create an XGen Description on a mesh object that is part of an existing group.