Ephere releases Ornatrix Maya 5
Ephere has released Ornatrix Maya 5, its latest update to the popular Maya plugin for creating hair, fur and feathers for games and VFX work.
The update adds a new Warp Roots operator to help groom feathers, plus new options for clumping and braiding hair, converting hair strands into meshes, and painting textures onto hair.
(Full disclosure: Version 5 actually shipped earlier this year, but Ephere has only just announced it officially on its website).
A versatile Maya hair plugin for game development and VFX work
First released in 2016, Ornatrix Maya is a well-established plugin for creating and grooming hair, fur and feathers on CG characters.
It offers a range of workflows for styling hair, including parametric or brush-based editing, and the option to ‘graft‘ preset grooms to the character’s surface.
The output is compatible with Arnold and standard third-party renderers, including Redshift, RenderMan and V-Ray.
The software has been used at a number of leading VFX and games studios including Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Ubisoft and Capcom.
Ornatrix Maya 5: new Warp Roots operator helps create feather grooms
New features in Ornatrix Maya 5 include the Warp Roots operator.
It makes it possible to bunch together or spread apart root positions, either by assigning a texture map, or by painting directly onto the character.
Ephere describes it as particularly useful when modeling feathers or sparse fur patterns.
Guide hair flow with ‘curved sinks’
There are also updates to several key existing operators, including Surface Comb.
It is now possible to draw smooth curves, or ‘curved sinks’, directly onto the surface of a character to control the flow of hairs, with options to direct, repel or attract the hair.
When using the Length operator to extend hair strands, it is now possible to extend them along curves for a more natural result.
Updated Clump operator makes it easier to create braids or other complex hairstyles
For creating more complex hairstyles, the Clump operator gets new clumping manipulators, making it possible to move, scale or rotate clumps at any point along their length.
It is also possible to generate braids procedurally at any point along the length of a clump, as shown in the video above, saving a lot of fiddly manual work.
New options for converting hair strands to hair meshes
There are also a couple of significant changes to the Mesh from Strands operator, which converts strands of hair into a faster-rendering mesh shape for games and real-time work.
One is the option to mesh groups of hairs into flat or tubular clumps; the other is to generate textures for the mesh procedurally from the original source hair, as shown in the video above.
Paint directly through textures onto hair to apply decals
Other new texturing workflows include the option to use the texture paint brush to paint through textures onto the hair in the viewport.
It provides a quick way to apply decals and more stylized patterns, as shown in the video above.
Workflow improvements for branching or combining grooms
Workflow improvements include the option to branch the Operator Stack, making it possible for multiple base objects to share the same groom.
The Merge operator, for combining multiple sub-grooms into one, gets new options for blending sub-grooms seamlessly, and resolving overlaps, as shown in the video above.
Price and system requirements
Ornatrix Maya 5 is compatible with Maya 2022+ on Windows 10+ and RHEL 8+ Linux, and with Maya 2024+ on macOS 13+. It has partial feature support on macOS.
A perpetual workstation licence now costs $649; rental now costs $59/month or $504/year.
Read an overview of Ornatrix Maya 5 on the product website
Read a full list of new features in Ornatrix Maya 5 in the online release notes
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