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.
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