ZBrush Cat - XGEN Fur

For the past week or so I've been exploring one of Maya's rings of hell - XGEN, which is notorious for being very buggy. I haven't managed to create anything amazing or got it to render too well but I have managed to teach myself the basics and apply that to my cat. (Left render is with aiStandardHair shader and the right is XGEN's default hair shader.)

There are two XGEN methods for creating hair. There's 'XGEN interactive' grooming which I've used for this as it is more artist friendly and allows me to work across separate layers and in chunks. And then there's the core XGEN which might be more ideal for sculpting human hair.

Below are some close ups of the groom in the viewport. You can create descriptions for UV shells in the UV Map editor so I created the body, tail, inner and outer ears separately although looking back maybe I should have kept the tail with the body.

I wondered, if I put a collar on the cat how would I get the fur to react to it? See how the fur parts on my cat as a result of her collar.

The answer? Collision modifier and increasing the collision distance value in the attribute editor.

Another way of creating hair partings are by either painting with the part brush or creating region maps.

Screenshot from Autodesk Website: HERE

BUGS!

I've found a few bugs, the most annoying one being that some hairs refuse to be combed nicely - this is most noticeable on the cat's tail where it looks quite ugly and there's a small patch symmetrically on the side of the front legs like it. Also when attempting to comb the inner ears, despite having 'Collide with mesh' ticked and testing different collision distance values, the hairs with one click (regardless of brush strength and size) immediately went inside the ear mesh. I haven't been able to figure out why any of this happens yet.

When I was creating a mask map for the clump modifier and turned the visibility off in the outliner for the body's XGEN description, I found random patches did not disappear, (the ears are supposed to be visible in the below screenshot). 

TUTORIALS!

For XGEN interactive, I found the below tutorial most helpful out of the total of 6 I watched for both XGEN methods.

For XGEN (not interactive) Flipped Normals have a great tutorial recently posted on Youtube.

Danny Mac also has a great short intro to XGEN (not interactive) for anyone who finds 40 minute long tutorials a bit daunting to begin with.