Ornatrix Maya: Blend shape deformer and grooming in Maya 2017 workflow issues

Hi Everyone I'm currently developing some characters using Maya 2017, Ornatrix, Advanced skeleton for the rigging and rendering in Redshift. I'm running into issues with my characters when it comes to adding some blend shapes using the Shape Editor in that Maya crashes whenever I try and add a blend target to a mesh that has Ornatrix applied to it. If I delete the Ornatrix node network from my character mesh, there is no longer a crash. Has anybody else run into this problem? I'm finding myself re-grooming my characters multiple times because it seems the hair grooming process seems to be at its most stable when done last and I have to remove it every time I want to make an adjustment to my character's blend shapes. Also, I'm having trouble saving out my grooms. I get the error "Assert failed: status(kInvalidParameter); Data is not an array". I suspect it's the combination of things going on with my character mesh (rigged, weighted and probably other things relating to the Advanced Skeleton setup process) or perhaps the presence of Redshift shaders, I don't know but it means that I literally need to start from scratch everytime I get rid of the hair to add a blend target or make some other amend. It would be really nice to preserve the hair and styling once I have it how I like it. I'd really appreciate some advice or tips from anybody who has some experience with this sort of thing. Many thanks!
11 November 2016 #10897
Jeordanis Figuereo	Hi Geoff, I'm gonna try to reproduce this issue and see If I can find the cause of this. I will let you know soon. Thanks for the report. Best Regards, Jeordanis F. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) LinkedIn Discord
11 November 2016 #10898
Jeordanis Figuereo	Hi, I'm still unable to reproduce your issue with the blend shapes, I can add blend shapes to the model or the scalp after grooming and use any other deformer. Can you please try with a new scene? Also, as a work-arround for now, you can "backup" the hair in form of curves. Extract the styled guides as curves using the Add Curves from Strands. When you are done with the Blend Shapes, created a new hair system based on those curves. Use the Gorund Strand operator to ground them to the scalp. And copy the other Nodes (curl, frizz, hairCluster, renderSetting) from the old to the new system I was able to reproduce the error when you try to save the groom. We take care of it as soon as posible. Thank you! Best Regards, Jeordanis F. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) LinkedIn Discord
11 November 2016 #10899
Jeordanis Figuereo	I noticed that even when you get that error when trying to save the groom, the grooms saved anyway. Please confirm If that happen in your system too. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) LinkedIn Discord
13 November 2016 #10900
Geoff_S	Hi Logikoma Thanks for the response and apologies for the delay getting back to you. I suspect some of the issues I'm running into are down to the layers of complexity in my workflow, and also there's some lack of experience in there too as I'm a relative Maya noob although I have been doing 3D for years. Anyway, I can create a sphere, apply a groom to it, apply a Redshift material and then sculpt a new blendshape without issue. The problem arises when I use an Advanced Skeleton rig combined with Ornatrix when I run into issues with blend shapes. If I try and create some blend shapes on the same character without Ornatrix, Maya doesn't crash. I appreciate though how many variables there are in my workflow and that's fine. In truth, it's prompted me to find a better workflow where I create the blend shape sculpts on the character mesh in a scene which is then referenced in to the scene where I apply the groom. This doesn't seem to cause a crash so far and I'm comfortable with it. Anyway, thanks again for the response, glad you could reproduce the other issue I mentioned.

Posted by:		Geoff_S
Data created:	10 November 2016