Animated interactive xgen cached for katana

[Anonymous]

I'm looking for an approach to getting animated interactive xgen fur caches into Katana. Converting to polygons works for only 1 frame.

Could the xgen be exported as an Arnold stand-in? If so, how do I import an ass file into Katana?

[Mike_Farnsworth]

It takes a bit of work to bring in a .ass file as a standin to Katana/KtoA, but we hope to add full .ass import (as proper Katana scenegraph locations) in the future. As it stands now, you can create a "renderer procedural" location in Katana to bring in a .ass standin. See the attached image below as an example.

However, you should be able to make use of animated xgen inside of Katana via the ArnoldXGen node in KtoA. If that isn't working, can you send a report to support@solidangle.com and we'll pick that up ASAP. Please include Maya, MtoA, and KtoA versions you are using, and any repro scene if you are able to package that up.

[Anonymous]

Just to clarify, I am specifically interested in rendering "Interactive XGen" in Katana. Can you please verify whether or not the ArnoldXGen supports Interactive XGen? Maya exports Interactive XGen as an .abc. The ArnoldXGen node seems to be expecting the older style xgen format (.xgen files).

When I try using an exported Interactive XGen .abc path in the ArnoldXGen node I get nothing in the scene graph.

If you can confirm that ArnoldXGen should work with the ArnoldXGen node I will gladly submit a support email.

[Anonymous]

Also, thank you for the standin example! My initial attempt failed at render time for some color manager issue,

ERROR  |  [ass] line 50: node "color_manager_syncolor" is not installed
ERROR  |  signal caught: SIGSEGV -- Invalid memory reference

I will continue to troubleshoot... Hopefully there is a better way to bring in animated interactive xgen caches.