Perhaps XGen’s biggest advantage for hair styling is that you can define the overall shape of a hairstyle (or anything else you want to generate procedurally) by placing guides on a model’s surface.

(Building a realistic hairstyle is a slow process.) Let’s take a look at what each system is good (and not so good) at doing. Confusingly, it offers three different (and essentially separate) ways to create hairstyles – two of which have “groom” in their name – all which is kinda confusing, and can make it hard to determine which of the three systems Autodesk’s documentation is referring to.īecause these four systems are essentially separate, and have different strengths and weaknesses, it’s important to choose the right one before you start creating a hairstyle. XGen (or more formally, XGen Geometry Instancer) is Maya’s procedural generation system for covering surfaces with hair, fur, grass, plants, forests, and more – basically, anything that needs lots of instances of similar things positioned over a mesh’s surface. You’ll note that three of these four options have “XGen” at the start of their name. (Maya also had an older hair generation system, now known as Classic Hair, which is deprecated, and so isn’t covered here.) XGen Interactive Grooming (a newer take on the grooming approach, which lets you use guides for the overall style, and then apply modifiers and use interactive grooming tools to refine the style).XGen with Groomable Splines (comb and style hairs using a selection of grooming tools to create a style).XGen with Guides (use guides to define the overall shape of a hairstyle, then apply styling modifiers on top to add the detail).

I’ve found four different ways to create hair in Maya: So, here’s the primer I wish I’d had, for anyone else in the same situation. It took me a long while to figure out the pros and cons of each, and at the time I was starting, I couldn’t find an overview of the different options available. Like so many things in Maya, I found that there were several different ways of achieving a single goal, each with their own advantages, disadvantages, and bugs. I’ve spent the past few months learning how to create realistic-looking hair in Maya.

Maya hair modeling