BUG with Xgen or ?
 

Hi guys,

I am trying to follow this tut for Xgen in Maya 2015 :

http://youtu.be/jl6vkIx2RBQ

Somehow I can't export .xrac file and what Xgen does is to create a .log file where .xrac file should be. Therefore I am stuck with my further education in the vast world of Maya 2015.

Do you have the same problem? I can't find someone commenting about that so I thought you geniuses must know!

I have the student version of Maya 2015 on Maverick

I had a similar problem, I was using an image plane in my scene to model from and that seemed to cause the problem. After deleting the image plane I was able to get an xarc export, my only problem now is that xgen doesn't want to distribute my model along the surface, instead its all over the place -.-' not the best morning...

A couple of things I observed creating archives for XGen:

- It does not like geometry with any construction history.
- Pivot points are important or else the instanced geometry will be all over the place. Set the pivot point and freeze transformations.
- It does not like geometry with multiple shape nodes. XFrog imports are big culprits of multiple shape nodes for the same piece of geo.
- It does not like duplicate shape node names.
- It has no problems with groups. I have not looked at what happens if the group members have pivot points different to that of the group.

If you don't see the xarc file, then the archive creation failed. Look at the content of the log file. It is a text file so you can use TextEdit to look at it or just open the script editor. The log is dumped there as well.

Even if the xarc file was created it still does not mean it worked. Look at the content of the abc, materials and mi folders.
- The abc folder should contain a file named <YourArchiveName>.abc.
- The materials folder should contain a file named <YourArchiveName>.ma.
- More importantly, the mi folder should contain all the compressed mental ray render proxy files. From what I have seen at least one file per shape node/shading group. The uncompressed version of each file should contain vxdata for the shape node.

I've noticed that the bigger the scene is, the more finicky XGen gets. For my first attempt I tried to create the archive from geometry in my final scene file. That did not go down well. The archive creation complained and failed on the shape node of a piece of geometry not even selected for exported. (Similar to Obi1Jacoby's experience) Maybe it's a bug but for now I am bypassing the problem by creating a temporary scene files containing only the items I want to create archives from.