Ornatrix 8

Ornatrix 8 is the most acclaimed plugin in max to create hair and fur. And the new version comes packed with new features:

Some of the most important updates are improvements on grooming. Its possible now to collapse or display all modifiers in the stack. Added support to vray 6.1 , updated to embree 3 for faster performance. the UI has been moved to QT, its faster, more responsive, and fixes some old bugs. Improvements on curling and much more. Check the complete list here:

• Grooms
• Box and unbox
• Boxing of whole or partial stack
• Unboxing a groom modifier to extract its constituent operators
• Switched grooms from XML-based .oxgroom format to YAML-based format, better encompassing operators and their data
• Groom modifier, containing multiple internal operators with ability to expose custom parameters
• Graft grooms (easy point and click creation of complete grooms on any character model)
• Importing new grooms can be done as: full-stack (recreate whole modifier stack), as a Groom modifier (encompassing procedural groom internally), or as a Baked Hair object (containing groom output result)
• Mohawk Hair, Short Afro, Short Pixie graft grooms included

• General
• Automatic change tracking of select operators (curling modifier, frizz modifier, groom modifier, strand multiplier modifier, normalize modifier)
• Switched vertex tangents to use Texture Coordinate generation method by default
• Operator baking now supports baking strand widths
• Using geodesic distance by default to calculate strand group blending effect

• GUI
• Replaced majority of Win32 operator GUI with Qt (quicker, scalable, fixes issues with ramp displayed separately)
• Added “Collapse All” and “Collapse To” options to main Ornatrix menu, allowing to collapse modifier stack while maintaining render version of the hair

• Performance improvements
• Switched to Embree 3, significantly improving performance in many places
• Now using Embree in more places like Ground Strands modifier
• Improved hair display performance
• Using SIMD optimizations to further improve performance

• Alembic Export
• Added MXS flag for exporting to UE for its groom import process.

• Surface Comb modifier
• New per-sink parameter support:
• Rotation adjustments
• Flow
• Slope ramp
• Channel export
• Added an option to export sink groups to channel data
• Added an option to set sink data values based on an absolute length
• Option to display sink lengths inside viewport

• Normalize modifier
• “By group” option separating its application by strand groups
• Added a ramp curve

• Curling modifier
• Magnitude and Phase randomness for Curl
• Add range values for Noise Scale parameter

• Filter modifier
• Added Channel and Map parameters to control random fraction to Filter operator

• Edit Guides modifier
• Allow to move only the roots of strands
• Allow the Create brush to add strands per-vertex and per-polygon face
• Interpolate planted guide between all selected strands instead of only the closest one
• Exposed Rotate Strands Edit Guides mode to MaxScript

• Hair from Guides
• Added “Hidden Guide Behavior” option for Hair from Guides (don’t generate hair for hidden guides)

• Baked hair
• Operator baking now supports baking strand widths
• Implemented full-stack import with Baked Hair object
• Added option to only load specific Alembic curves

• Guides from Guide Mesh modifier
• Preserves strand rotations

• Alembic Importer
• “Export Surface Positions” option for Alembic, allowing to export propagated strands like feathers

• Mesh from Strands modifier
• Mesh from Strands Conform to Surface option smoothly blends the roots to surface

• Guides from Shape modifier
• Added vertex color channels

• Clump modifier
• Dynamic clumping, allowing animated clump count and changes to clump count on the fly
• Added option to set strand groups based on clump ownership
• “Ground Displaced Roots” option

• Ground Strands modifier
• Mesh evaluation at specified time when grounding

• Strand Animation modifier
• Added option to only load specific Alembic curves

• V-Ray support
• V-Ray Standalone plugin uses new serialization, provides a much more complete implementation
• V-Ray standalone plugin is available for Linux
• V-Ray Standalone plugin updated to V-Ray 6.10