Hi everyone, hope you are having a manageable day.

So, I'm poking around in Xgen because I want to learn something new and also curious how this would fit into a character workflow.  In the past I've used hair cards, which was a great experience and I learned a lot from that.  But in my pursuit to recreate cool hairstyles, I thought I'd give Xgen a try and just see what happens.

After poking about a bit and watching tutorials, I wanted to try the workflow of extracting curves from geometry to then convert into guides.  I did just that, but for some reason when I then convert those curves to guides, the roots were in the wrong place.

What the heck was going on? I couldn't find the answer online, so I turned to some community groups.  Someone suggested to check which way the curves were pointing.  Such a simple thing to overlook. After a quick test, that was the problem!

So, to fix it, I just reversed the direction and voila!  Fixed.

Now time to get styling!

Hi everyone, hope you are having a manageable day.

In my project Chrysosandalaimopotichthonia, or Sandal for short, I came across a problem I had no idea was a problem until deep in the UV unwrapping phase.  Since this is something I didn't know before, I want to share it with you in case you were also struggling figuring out why this was a problem.

There are repeating elements in Sandal's design, such as the eyelets on her clothing, the spine bones, flowers, crystals, etc., which I wanted to save time and texture space by having those unwrapped before placing them.

I built both a high poly and low poly version as separate objects in Blender, unwrapped the low poly version, then exported them both as one FBX.  My thinking here was it would be very easy to then assign polygroups if the objects were separated in Zbrush.  I can then use the different polygroups to quickly and easily separate the HP from the LP.

This is where I didn't know things would go wrong.  Since Zbrush imports the combined FBX but separate objects as separate tools, checking the UV unwrap on the low poly version worked as expected.  Everything would surely be alright going forward, right?  Nope.  Once I combined the HP and LP in Zbrush, the UVs on the LP were completely discarded.  I had no idea, I didn't have test textures displayed (which I probably would've caught the problem if I had textures displayed), so I went on my merry way, making curve brushes, placing everything.  Looks good.  But I had no idea the trouble and headaches that would come.

After some testing in Zbrush, it looks like you have to combine the HP and LP into one object before importing into Zbrush to keep the LP UV unwrap.  Then, assign the polygroups to the proper HP and LP versions, apply your brush settings, and away you can go!  Everything should be running smoothly after that.

Thank you for reading.  I hope this was helpful and saves you a headache or two.

Now to figure out why the flowers had similar problems.

EDIT: After poking around more extensively, I discovered you have to use this on an object that is unwrapped, or else the UVs are chucked again.