Hi guys
I am tasked to model and texture some game-ready realistic animals for a client. For my workflow, i'm looking for a way to convert xgen fur into geometry tubes, such as Zbrush fibermesh or max hair convert to mesh.
What i am trying to do is to project-bake the normals of a complete fur to the low poly mesh of an animal sculpt.
What i have done so far is to groom the animal, convert to geometry, import to marmoset and bake. The problem with this is that the generated mesh is in "strands", wich results in face normals to be "arbitrarly" oriented. This causes a huge problem in the baking of the normal map when projected, beceause some strands face the wrong direction.
I have been thinking about exporting the fur to curves to then run a wire tool, but maya just crashes right away after the creation of the curves, so i can't even imagine running the wire tool. Once converted, the generated mesh of the fur is about 30M poly (in a 5 times lower density that what i'd hope for, but it's still ok, i can still export it, reimport in marmoset and manage to bake it). In the "Convert XGen Primitives to Polygons" options, there is a setting to insert spans and a curvature, wich nearly creates a tube, but it just does 180° of it, and there is no way to increase that parameter further to have a full tube. You'll tell me to create the fur in zbrush or max, but the grooming tools are not as good and i can't quite get to the quality that i'm aiming for. I've also considered purchasing Yeti, but after some googling, i can't find any clue on werther that would be possible or not with it.
As a final hope, i come here hoping that someone would be able to get a work around this. I actually don't know anything about coding/scripting, so i don't even know if it's possible, but if someone has a solution, i'm willing to pay for it.
Thank-you !