The Assistant

The Assistant is an AI agent built into Ornatrix App. You describe what you want in plain language and it builds it: it adds operators, tunes their parameters, renders the viewport to check its own work, and adjusts until the result matches what you asked for. It works on your live groom, so everything it does appears in the Operator Stack exactly as if you had done it by hand, and everything is undoable.

The Assistant is experimental and is turned off by default. It also requires your own Anthropic API key: Ornatrix does not include or resell access to the model, and usage is billed to your own Anthropic account.

Requirements

An Anthropic API key, from https://platform.claude.com. The key is yours; you are billed for what the Assistant uses.
An internet connection. The Assistant sends your requests to Anthropic's servers to be processed.

Turning it on

The Assistant is controlled by a setting, so it is not visible until you enable it:

Open Settings and Preferences and set Interface.EnableAssistantPanel to on.
Restart Ornatrix App. This setting is only read at startup.
Open the Console panel. A new Assistant checkbox appears in its toolbar.
Tick Assistant. A password field appears next to it; paste your Anthropic API key there. The key is stored in your local settings and is sent only to Anthropic.

The command line at the bottom of the Console now accepts plain language instead of Python. The hint text changes to confirm this.

Using it

Type what you want and press Enter. Some examples that work well:

"Create a furry sphere."
"Make the hair longer and curlier."
"This looks too uniform - add some variation to the length."
"Show me a render."

Two things are worth knowing to get good results:

It works on the current groom. If you want it to start fresh, clear the scene first, or say so in your request.
It can see its own renders. Asking it to "check" or "show" the result makes it render and look at the image, which noticeably improves what it produces on visual requests such as curliness or density.

Everything the Assistant does goes through the normal command stack, so it is all undoable. By default a whole request is folded into a single undo step named after what you asked for, so Ctrl+Z takes the groom back to how it was before the request and Ctrl+Y brings all of it back. Anything you changed yourself while the Assistant was working is part of that same step. See Undoing a request below.

While it is working

A request is rarely instant. A single one usually becomes several operations: the Assistant looks at the current scene, makes a change, renders the viewport to see the result, and then refines. While that is happening the application makes it plain that an agent is in control.

The window is framed. A coloured border runs around the whole application and pulses about once a second for as long as the Assistant is working. It stops pulsing and holds steady when the Assistant is waiting for an answer from you, so a glance at the edge of the screen tells you whose turn it is.
A badge appears at the top of the window, naming what the Assistant is doing right now - "Adding an operator", "Rendering the groom" - and how long the request has been running.
The Console records each operation, so you can follow the work in detail while it happens and read it back afterwards. Long replies are shortened to their first line; hover it to read the whole reply, and copying the line copies the full text.

Cancelling

The badge carries a Cancel button, and a second one appears at the end of the Console command line while a request is running. Either one abandons the request.

The Assistant stops a moment later rather than instantly, so a cancelled request has usually changed something already. Ornatrix asks what to do with those changes: a dialog names the step and offers Keep Changes, which leaves them in place as one undo step you can still undo by hand, or Undo Changes, which takes the groom straight back to how it was before the request. Undoing this way is not destructive - the whole request stays on the redo stack, so Ctrl+Y brings it back if you change your mind.

Tick Don't ask again in that dialog to always do whatever you chose, without being asked in future. The choice can be changed later from the settings described below.

Typing while it works

You do not have to wait for a request to finish before typing the next one. A message sent while the Assistant is busy is queued rather than lost, and goes out as soon as the current request ends; the badge shows how many messages are waiting. Cancelling discards the queue along with the request.

Undoing a request

A single request usually becomes many operations, and undoing them one at a time would be tedious and easy to get wrong. Ornatrix therefore records the whole of a request as one undo step, named after what you asked for, so the Edit menu reads for example "Undo: AI: make the hair curly". One Ctrl+Z returns the groom to the state it was in before you pressed Enter, and one Ctrl+Y reapplies the entire request.

The step covers everything that happened while the Assistant was working, including changes you made alongside it. That is deliberate: while a request runs you are free to keep working, and undoing partway into a shared stretch of history would leave the groom in a state neither of you produced.

If a request is followed by further messages you typed while it was running, all of them belong to the same step, and its name says so.

Occasionally a request cannot honestly be described as one step, and Ornatrix then leaves its operations as separate undo entries rather than promising something it cannot deliver. That happens when the Assistant replaces the whole groom more than once during a request (each replacement discards the previous one, which no later undo can bring back), and when it undoes further back than the point its own request started from.

Two settings under Interface -> Assistant control this:

Group AI Assistant changes into a single undo step - on by default. Turn it off to have every operation stay its own undo entry, as any other edit would.
When an AI Assistant action is cancelled - what happens to the changes of a cancelled request: Ask what to do (the default, described under Cancelling above), Keep the changes, or Undo the changes.

Notes and questions

The Assistant can also put messages on screen instead of only in the Console. They appear as cards in the bottom-right corner, labelled Assistant.

Passing notes fade away on their own after a few seconds. They report something the Assistant has just done and that you can safely miss.
Pinned notes stay until you close them. The Assistant uses these for something worth reading after the fact: what it changed and why, a caveat, or a result you need to act on.
Questions offer a row of answers to choose from, and the Assistant waits for your choice before carrying on. Use them: a question means the request was genuinely ambiguous, and answering it gets you what you meant rather than a guess. If you close a question instead of answering it, the Assistant is told that you declined, picks the most reasonable option itself, and tells you which one it took.

Each of these is written to the Console as well, so the conversation stays complete once a card is gone.

What it can and cannot do

The Assistant can only operate on grooms. It can inspect the scene and the operator graph, create operators and connect them, read and change operator parameters, load and save grooms, resolve asset search paths, render the viewport, and manage operator plugins.

It deliberately has no access to your file system, shell, or network beyond the above. It cannot read or write arbitrary files, run commands, or browse the web. It also cannot close the application.

Cost and privacy

The Assistant sends your typed requests, a description of your groom's structure (operator names, types and parameter values), and any viewport renders it takes, to Anthropic for processing. It does not send your groom files or your source meshes.

Because you supply your own API key, all usage is billed directly to your Anthropic account. A single request that involves several renders costs more than a simple question. If cost matters to you, prefer specific requests over open-ended ones, and cancel a request that has clearly gone the wrong way rather than letting it finish.

Troubleshooting

The Assistant checkbox is missing. The setting is off, or the application has not been restarted since it was changed.

"ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is not set". No key has been entered in the field next to the Assistant checkbox.

It reports that the application is unreachable. The Assistant reaches your groom through the same local control endpoint described in Using Ornatrix with Claude. Enabling the Assistant enables that endpoint automatically, so this normally means the endpoint could not start - most often because its port is already in use by another running copy of Ornatrix App.

It seems to be taking a long time. The badge at the top of the window says what it is doing and for how long. A request that involves several renders legitimately takes a while. If it is not going anywhere, press Cancel.

Nothing happens when I type. Check the badge: if a request is already running, your message has been queued and will be sent when that request finishes. If the border is steady rather than pulsing, the Assistant is waiting for you to answer a question card in the bottom-right corner.

It stops responding partway through a request. Operations that change the scene have to wait for the application to draw a frame. If the application is busy with a very heavy groom, an operation can time out and the request will stop. Simplify the groom or reduce the hair count and try again.

For anything else, the Assistant writes a diagnostic log named assistant_sidecar.log next to the Ornatrix App executable, recording every operation it attempted and any error. Include it when reporting a problem.

Using Ornatrix with Claude - drive Ornatrix from Claude Desktop or other AI tools instead of the built-in panel.
Scripting with the Python Console - the same panel, in scripting mode.
The Operator Stack - where the Assistant's work appears.

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