Guide Snap
Overview
This tool has two main functions: For Daz Studio workflow where the creation of hair does not originate from Maya Xgen and the guides need to be snapped to tubes/cards or curves.
Merging curves that goes into a French braid style hair.
You can now use a ramp to control the tip/root snapping strength.
Merge Side Curves into a French Braid
Use the Curve To Braids Tool to create center curves.
NOTE: The 'first CV' of Maya curve need to be "sitting on" or "through" the scalp geo, it can not be floating in 3D space.
Select a guide, and shift select a Maya curve and click Snap Guide.
Remove excess points and sculpt the guide better to fit with the hair flow.
Please be noted that using Undo (Ctrl + Z) will not work due to nature of XGen.
You can also snap a guide to a Maya curve. Use XGen's add guide function, with the new guide selected, select another curve in scene and click on Snap Guide.
Using The Ramp Control
When the ramp value is all the way up, it's the 'full' snapping strength. Here we are snapping just the tip of an XGen guide to a Maya curve with a fall off (Tip:1.0, Root:0.0).
When the ramp value is half way up, it uses half of the snapping strength.
Daz Studio Guides Snap to Curves
Another popular usage to this tool is for Daz users, to reconstruct the exported curves from Daz studios into XGen guides.
As the snapping is still based on Maya curves, you will need to convert all the tubes/cards into Maya curves first. If the geometries are tubes, make sure Extract From is set to “Tubes”. Set to “Cards” if they come in as cards. Then select all the tubes/cards (NOT the groups), and click on the ‘Create Center Curve’ button. This will create a curve in the ‘center’ of each tube/card. Please note, this will create a ‘xgt_guideSnap_curves’ group and the extracted curve(s) will be put under it.
To snap single guide to curve, select the guide first, and shift select the a curve, then click “Snap Guide”.
To batch snap, select the Xgen description node (Or the subdPatch node), and shift select the curve ‘group’ (‘xgt_guideSnap_curves’ ). Click ‘Batch Snap Guide’.
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