Ephere releases Ornatrix 3 for Cinema 4D
Ephere has released Ornatrix 3 for Cinema 4D, the latest version of the Cinema 4D edition of its plugin for generating dynamic hair, fur and feathers.
The update adds a new Graft Grooms system, making it possible to place readymade procedural hair grooms onto a character’s surface, and to ‘box’ grooms into single modifiers.
Full disclosure: the update was actually released last month, but it doesn’t seem to have had a lot of coverage on community websites, so we felt it was worth a story.
A powerful solution for hair grooming and dynamics
First released in 2020, the Cinema 4D edition of Ornatrix makes the plugin available within the motion graphics and animation software, as well as for 3ds Max, Maya and Unreal Engine.
It includes the key toolsets for generating and grooming hair from the other editions, including both brush-based workflows and parametric editing.
For hair dynamics, it features Ephere’s Moov physics engine, and works within Cinema 4D’s deformer and tag framework, accepting inputs from native C4D forces.
Pipeline features include the option to convert mesh strips into Ornatrix hair, to import or export hair in Alembic format, and to convert hair and hair guides to NURBS curves.
Ornatrix hair renders natively in Arnold, Corona and Redshift, and can be converted to a mesh or spline curves for rendering in other renderers like OctaneRender and V-Ray.
New Graft Grooms system creates entire hair grooms in a few clicks
To that, Ornatrix 3 for Cinema 4D introduces several new features originally released in Ornatrix 4 for Maya, the Maya edition of the plugin.
They include Graft Grooms: a new type of preset designed to make it possible to create entire grooms through a simple point-and-click workflow.
Users drag across the surface of a character to draw a graft surface, from which Ornatrix generates the hair automatically.
There are presets for different hairstyles, but users can also create their own custom grafts, which can then be reused between projects or shared with other artists.
New options to box grooming operators and bake modifiers
Other changes include a new system for ‘boxing’ Ornatrix operators, which combines set of operators in a single Groom modifier.
Operators combined in this way remain procedurally editable, and can be unboxed again to make it possible to edit them individually.
It is also now possible to bake modifiers, which caches their output, speeding up evaluation and reducing temporal artefacts, at the expense of absolute accuracy.
Other feature and performance improvements
There release also features updates to many of the key modifiers, including Edit Guides, Guides from Guide Mesh, Clump, Surface Comb, Noise and Mesh from Strands.
Performance has been improved by “up to 100x” in “various parts” of the app, although an improvement of “around 90%” when mirroring circular brushes seems more likely to be typical.
Price and system requirements
Ornatrix 3 for Cinema 4D is available for Cinema 4D R25+ on Windows 10+ and macOS 10.14+. A perpetual license costs $599; rental costs $50/month or $420/year.
Read a full list of new features in Ornatrix 3 for Cinema 4D in the online release notes
Read more about Ornatrix for Cinema 4D on Ephere’s website
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