loading xgen plugin

[t.voll]

I believe I have the environment variables (MAYA_PATH, MTOA_PATH, and XGEN_LOCATION) setup correctly as per the ArnoldXGen node. I also added the mtoa procedurals dir and the xgen lib dir to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. However, at render time the xgen_procedural plugin fails to load.

00:00:00  99MB  | loading plugin: /mnt/software/maya/linux/modules/maya/mtoa/2017/1.4.1/procedurals/xgen_procedural.so ...
00:00:00  99MB  | no plugins loaded
00:00:00  99MB ERROR  | node "xgen_procedural" is not installed
00:00:00  99MB ERROR  | [kat] unable to create arnold procedural '/root/world/geo/xgen/legacyxgen_2017_fur_hoop_col_fur_hoop_desc_pTorus1'

Any suggestions of what I might be missing?

[Stephen.Blair]

xgen_procedural also depends on Maya libraries. Run ldd on xgen_procedural

[Mike_Farnsworth]

Usually just setting MAYA_PATH and MTOA_PATH before running Katana with KtoA is sufficient. It appears that your KtoA version is too old and doesn't recognize some directory structure changes in MtoA. To fix that, you'll need one of the following solutions:

• If you're using KtoA 1.1.x, update to the latest 1.1.5.1 (the 1.1.5 series has several fixes for XGen)
• If you're using KtoA 2.0.x, update to at least 2.0.1.0
• If you can't update for whatever reason, check your MtoA installation. If it has a "shaders" directory, but not a "procedurals" directory with xgen_procedural in it, then you will need to create a symbolic link or copy of "shaders" named "procedurals" so that KtoA can find the XGen procedural.

A bit more detail about those environment variables: KtoA tries to automatically find out the paths to the Maya libraries and adds it to the environment so that xgen_procedural can be loaded. If the paths aren't set just right, it will fail to load the procedural. For example, with a vanilla install of Maya 2017 and MtoA (downloaded from the solidangle.com website), you might have:

MAYA_PATH=/usr/autodesk/maya2017
MTOA_PATH=/opt/solidangle/mtoa/2017

Setting XGEN_LOCATION usually isn't needed, because it's in the same place inside the Maya installation most of the time, and KtoA can figure that out on its own.

[t.voll]

Thanks for the helpful feedback @Mike Farnsworth and @Stephen Blair. There was one final piece of the puzzle missing. It turns out that mtoa 1.4.1 was causing an issue. I see rendered hair when using mtoa 2.0.0.