Ephere releases Ornatrix Maya v4
Ephere has released Ornatrix Maya v4, its latest update to the Maya edition of its hair and feathers plugin, adding a new Graft Groom preset system for creating complete hair grooms in a few clicks.
The update also makes it possible to package procedural grooming operators into a single operator, updates the Surface Comb, Hair from Guides and Clumping operators, and introduces a new Arnold procedural.
A versatile Maya hair plugin used by leading game developers
First released in 2016, Ornatrix for Maya brings the established 3ds Max hair and fur plugin to Maya users.
It offers a range of workflows for generating and grooming hair, including parametric or brush-based editing.
The software has been used at VFX and games studios including Framestore, Ubisoft and Capcom.
New Graft Grooms system creates entire hair grooms in a few clicks
New features in Ornatrix Maya v4 include Graft Grooms: a new type of preset designed to make it possible to create entire grooms through a simple poinht-and-click workflow.
Users drag across the surface of a character to draw a graft surface, which generates the hair automatically.
There are presets for long hair, short hair and eyebrows, but users can also create their own custom grafts, which can then be reused between projects or shared with other artists.
Updates to key operators, plus option to ‘box’ operators
Other changes include a new system for ‘boxing’ Ornatrix operators, which combines a set of operators in a single Groom operator.
Unlike the existing Bake command, operators combined in this way remain procedurally editable, and can be unboxed again to make it possible to edit them individually.
There are also updates to the Surface Comb, Hair from Guides and Clumping operators, and a new Arnold procedural, speeding up hair rendering in Autodesk’s Arnold renderer.
Under the hood, Ornatrix has been moved to Embree 3, a newer version of Intel’s CPU ray tracing library, “significantly” improving hair display performance, although Ephere doesn’t put a figure on the speed boost.
Price and system requirements
Ornatrix Maya v4 is available for recent versions of Maya running on Windows, Linux and macOS. A workstation licence costs $599; rental costs $50/month or $420/year.
Read a full list of new features in Ornatrix Maya v4 in the online release notes