Maya XGen Animated Hair to Modo for Rendering

[JabbaTheNut]

I have V-Ray 3 for Maya and V-Ray 3 for Modo. Is there a way to animate XGen hair in Maya, export to Alembic cache and render the animated hair in Modo? I have heard about V-Ray Proxy. However, I cannot find any tutorials on how to use it in the above context (i.e., XGen animated hair exported for use in V-Ray Proxy in Modo). Can someone give me an idea of how to do it?

If V-Ray Proxy is the wrong approach, what would you suggest?

[Morbid Angel]

Im not sure about vray proxy, but you can export the hair as .vrscene, if modo can read the .vrscene then it should work.

[JabbaTheNut]

Hi Morbid,

Unfortunately, this did not work for me. It may be due to my lack of knowledge surrounding .vrscene files. From Maya's XGen primitive output parameters for my hair description, I selected vrscene as the output and specified a file name. I then clicked Export Now. I then attempted to import the created .vrscene file into Modo. Nothing showed up. I then tried to import the .vrscene file into Maya (just for fun). Nothing showed up in Maya either.

Is there some kind of tutorial for getting Maya XGen animated hair from Maya to Modo? If not, can someone shell out a quick bullet point list of what I need to do to accomplish this?

Thanks for your help.

[Morbid Angel]

No, that's not how I thought you should output the hair from maya.

You have to have nothing visible in the scene except the hair as you would render just the hair. Specify output to .vrscene then uncheck render in maya render globals, and you have to press render for vray to output the .vrscene with the hair.

[vladimir.nedev]

The .vrscene import command in MODO doesn't support importing hair.
Maybe in the future, but certainly not animated hair, as that will make the MODO scene too big, since the animation is baked per-frame inside the .vrscene.

In Maya there is a way to reference a .vrscene file and render it out exactly like it would be rendered on its own by V-Ray Standalone.
We will add this to V-Ray for MODO eventually.

For now, I would suggest trying to export the XGen hair as an animated Alembic. There should be tutorials on this around the net I guess.
Then you can load the Alembic files in a V-Ray Proxy inside V-Ray for MODO.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev