Create hair, fur, or instanced geometry using XGen presets
Create hair, fur, or instance geometry by applying an XGen preset to your polygon mesh. Start hair and fur grooms with presets or use them to manage shot-based hair styles, landscapes, and environments. Presets are topology independent, so you can apply them to low and high resolution versions of your character mesh or to different mesh shapes.
Create hair and fur using grooming brushes
Use the grooming brushes to add, scale, sculpt, and position groomable splines for your character's hair or fur. Groomable splines are non-renderable spline primitives that you first shape using the brushes, and then preview and render as default spline primitives. Use the brush-based grooming tools to create beards, stubble, crew-cut hair styles, and short fur.
Create hair or fur using spline primitives
Create all styles of hair and fur by instancing spline primitives on your character mesh. For example, use spline curves for long or short hair, eyebrows, mustaches, and beards. You can also use spline curves to create grass, ropes, and other objects for landscapes.
Instance primitive and archive geometry
Instance geometry on the surface of polygon objects to create all types of landscapes and environment scenes. XGen includes default spline, sphere, and card primitives as well as a number of geometry objects, such as simple trees and flowers.
Create a hairstyle using Tube Groom
Use tube-shaped polygon meshes to define the shape of a default spline hair groom. XGen generates guides from the shape of the modeled tube objects.
Create custom archives from selected objects
Create custom archive primitives from selected polygon objects in your scene. Maya saves the exported geometry and materials to an archive directory in a location you specify.
Create custom archives from scene files
Select one or more scene files and batch convert the geometry objects in each scene to custom archives. Use this option to convert a number of objects in different scene files to archive primitives.
Save hair, fur, or instanced geometry as XGen presets
Save your grooms or instanced geometry as XGen presets, which can be applied to any mesh object. Saving a preset creates an XGP file that contains all of the Description's attribute and XGen modifier settings, guides and expressions.
Add a preset to the XGen Library
Save XGen geometry instancer and interactive grooming presets to the XGen Library. You can select saved presets from the library to apply them to selected mesh objects or to the selected faces of a mesh object.