Tag Archives: Maya

[Arnold] Rendering XGen in Softimage

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That mohawk-like hair on his head? XGen primitives (splines). Created in Maya, rendered in Softimage.
hairy_creature_xgen

  1. Export an ASS file with XGen stuff from Maya.
  2. Set the PATH to include the Maya plug-ins\xgen\bin and bin folders. 
    set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\plug-ins\xgen\bin;C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin
  3. Add the MtoA shaders and procedurals to the search paths in the Arnold Render Options.
  4. Add an Arnold Standin property to a mesh and point it to the ASS file.
  5. And that’s it!

The case of the dotXSISceneConverter that wouldn’t load into Maya

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In this case, a customer installed Crosswalk for Maya, but he got “Unable to dynamically load dotXSISceneConverter.mll” errors when he tried to load the plugin.

// Error: line 1: Unable to dynamically load : C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2013/bin/plug-ins/dotXSISceneConverter.mll
The specified module could not be found.
 // 
// Error: line 1: The specified module could not be found.
 // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get controlCommand list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get modelEditorCommand list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get command list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get constraintCommand list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel.core : Failed to get depend nodes list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: line 1: The specified module could not be found.
 (dotXSISceneConverter) //

Now, this is pretty much the same error you get in Softimage if your PATH is missing the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Softimage location. That’s where the main Crosswalk DLL is installed. To verify this, I fired up Dependency Walker and loaded dotXSISceneConverter.mll (the Maya Crosswalk plugin). And sure enough, I saw that the Maya plugin depends on Crosswalk_2013.0.64.dll (the other errors are for Maya DLLs, so they can be safely ignored, and anything about IESHIMS.DLL can always be ignored).

dotXSISceneConverterMLL-Depends

So the fix is to add the missing Common Files\Softimage path to the PATH environment variable. The Crosswalk installer is supposed to take care of adding C:\Program Files\Common Files\Softimage to the PATH environment variable, but in this case, it apparently didn’t.