One of my students asked for an overview of setting up XGen for grooming in Maya 2025 and VRay 6.
Grooming in cg, especially for complex characters can be a fairly deep topic. At most studios there are people who specialize in grooming and costuming for cg characters - CFX Artists. So this won’t be an exhaustive guide on XGen and character grooming, but should hopefully give you enough information to get started.
Setting Up XGen
To begin, we of course need to setup the plugin. XGen is now included with Maya and easily accessible in the plugin manager.
Loading the plugin will add this shelf which contains the XGen tools
This will load all the default XGen tools, now accessible from the XGen shelf in Maya. Note that we also want to load the xgenVRay.py script to translate the XGen into the compiled .vrscene file which is rendered by VRay.