Alembic Export 

Alembic (.abc) is the standard interchange format for hair, widely supported across renderers and DCC applications. Exporting your groom to Alembic is the usual way to take finished hair out of Ornatrix App and render or work with it elsewhere, and it is also how you create the caches used by the Animation Cache Operator.

 

Exporting hair 

Export the current groom's hair to an Alembic file through the export dialog. The dialog lets you control how the hair is written so it matches what your downstream renderer or application expects. Animated grooms can be exported across a frame range, producing an animated cache.

 

What you can export 

• Static hair or guides as curve data.
• Animated hair over a frame range, as a cache that plays back elsewhere or in the App.
• Hair shaded by a Hair Material carries the per strand colors that material gives it (base and tip colors, hue variation) in a per vertex color parameter, named for the target host chosen in the Export Data tab (Cd, displayColor, groom_color). For the Unreal Engine target the colors are always written per vertex, because Unreal's groom importer reads only a per vertex groom_color. Unreal's default hair material does not display it, so assign a material that feeds the Hair Attributes node's Base Color output into Base Color. From Python the same export runs as export_scene(path, target_host="UnrealEngine").

 

Common uses 

• Hand finished hair to a renderer that reads Ornatrix-compatible Alembic curves.
• Create an animation cache to load back into the Animation Cache Operator for fast, repeatable playback.
• Archive a groom's hair as a portable, renderer-neutral file.

 

Related 

• Alembic Import - bring Alembic hair or geometry back in.
• USD Export - export to USD instead.
• Importing and Exporting Geometry - overview of all interchange in the App.

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