New: Ephere Ornatrix 8 for 3ds Max is Now Available

Push your cg grooming workflow to the next level with Ephere Ornatrix 8 for 3ds Max. With lots of new features and improvements, Ornatrix v8 allows you to create incredible hair, fur, and feathers right inside 3ds Max.

What’s new in Ornatrix v8 for 3ds Max?

New features like graft grooms, dynamic baking, QT UI, and modifier boxing are just some of the changes waiting to push your cg grooming workflow to the next level.

• 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