Grooming

This R&D explores a hybrid grooming workflow between Maya XGen and Houdini.

The idea was to create and shape the groom guides in XGen, export those curves to Houdini for simulation and additional procedural processing, and then bring the result back into Maya for reuse in the final groom setup.

The workflow is not especially simple or artist-friendly, but it gave me the opportunity to combine the strengths of both applications.

I find Houdini much stronger for procedural grooming, simulation, and deformation workflows, while XGen gives me more direct control over guide creation and initial groom shaping.

The main goal of this experiment was to see whether both tools could be combined into a practical pipeline: using XGen for guide design and Houdini for simulation and procedural control, while still keeping the result compatible with the Maya-based production workflow.