4 - Hello X-Gen my old friend... I've come to talk to you again.

So when I was done with shading the head I had to face my old foe. It had been at least three years since I touched X-gen in any serious way so I had some work to do.

I started to watch some tutorials from The Gnomon Workshop. This helped allot with the problems I encountered years before and I started to find out what I used to do wrong. For instance I used to be quite messy with my file structuring and X-gen handles unorganized file structuring particularity bad. I also had almost zero knowledge of how to work with PTEX. maps and how to use those in combination with normal texture maps, this got me into trouble a couple of times as well.

After some experimenting I started to make allot of progress and this time nothing broke and it did not end into a catastrophy at all.

I had allot of fun grooming and experimenting with the different clumping techniques and after a while I got some pretty good results.

In the past I could not figure out why the Vray displacement dit not correspond with the displacement I used in the Xgen attributes. This time I did some more research and I found a small but really helpful PDF document from Ethan crossno about a workflow that gave me enough information to make it work.

I already had some of the texture maps that had to drive the density ,root and tip color. After some experiments It was coming together nicely. It needed some adjustments that I would do later on.

For now I will concentrate at some pieces of the armor and other attributes I need

for the head but I might tweak the fur later on, if I find further improvements. In the next post I will talk a little about the additional armor I'm working on and how I used Substance painter to get some quick texture maps.