GUIDE COLOR TOOL
XGen does not allow a simple way of changing the color of its guides, except for painting a map and using it as in the guide color attribute under preview/output tab.​ 
​Guide Color Tool is built to automate all these process. Utilizing Maya display layers and sets, it provides another way of guide organization, allowing users to distinguish between guides much better.
  • Last updated: V.12.04
Guide Info:
  • Name of color layer that selected guides are in. It displays the last word of the assigned color layer separated by “_”. If guides not in the current description are selected, ‘Alien’ will be displayed, and the info box will turn red. 
S-M-L:
  • Size of the UI. Small, Midium, or Large.
Current Collection:
  • The collection that XGen is currently on. 
Current Description:
  • The description that XGen is currently on.  Only guides in the current description should be selected when creating a guide color layer. ​​
Preview Percent:
  • ​Determines the primitive preview percent each time when a guide color ptex map is re-baked. Set this to 0 when first assigning colors to avoid confusion
Color Radius:
  • This setting is highly dependent on the scalp mesh face counts. To be able to assign color to XGen guides, it's taking the underlying scalp mesh, subdividing it enough to paint the color on nearby vertices. Lowering the radius will give more precise result (slower), increasing the radius will give rougher result (faster). Default of 1.00 works well in most cases. Please only lower this number if there are guides very close to each other and the color is bleeding through from one layer to another.
Color Random:
  • Varies the value between each guides, but keeping the hue and saturation.
Resolution:
  • Coloring is done by baking a map. This slider controls the resolution of the map. Higher resolution will yields a more fine, crispier edge (Slower)​.  When color is bleeding through to nearby guides, it is recommended to try and lower the 'Threshold' slider first.  Increasing the resolution setting will result in slower calculation.
Visualize:
  • ​Check this on to see the map being baked on the underly scalp. Make sure to toggle shaded (default hot key 6 in Maya).
  • Please watch this video for some demonstration on color settings.
Full Update:
  • Rebake a Ptex map using the color settings from above to all the guides in the current description.
Update Selected:
  • Rebake a Ptex using the settings from above to only selected guides in the current description.​
Create Guide Layer:
  • ​Select guides in current description, and creates a guide color layer. If no guide(s) are selected, it creates an empty layer.
Layer Name Button - 
  • Left Click:
    • ​​​​​selects the guides in the layer
  • Middle Click:
    • ​toggles Isolate Mode  The global visibility will be unchanged.
  • Right Click:
    • ​add/remove guides, modify taper/width of guides in this layer, or rename this layer.
  • Ctrl + Click or Shift + Click:
    • ​ select multiple layers
​
Sets (1-9):
  • Allows another layer of organization. Users can choose to add guide layers to a set to quickly select them, toggle their visibility, locks, or move groups of layers up and down the list. At the moment there are 9 sets avaliable for each XGen description. 
  • Left Click:
    • Selects the all the layers (and the guides in those layers) in this set
  • Right Click:
    • ​Set menu
"C" Button:
  • ​The C button clears all layer sets assignment.
NOTE:
Error 1: an error saying Description can not be refreshed,
Solution: Please restart Maya and try again.
​
Error 2: RuntimeError: Failed to export the attribute map. 
Solution: Chances are that there are some unknown attributes that makes the UV disappear during a 'remesh' process. Unfortunately, when this happens, please export the growth mesh as .obj, and reimport it back in, and use that as the growth geometry.