Edit Guides Operator
The Edit Guides operator is the main hub for editing strands by hand. Where most operators change a groom parametrically, Edit Guides lets you work directly: plant and delete guides, reshape them, brush them, and assign groups and channels. It is usually the operator you spend the most interactive time in, sitting just above Guides from Mesh Operator to refine the guides before dense hair is generated.
Although it is named for guides, it can also edit dense hair when placed above Hair from Guides Operator, or after converting hair to guides with Guides from Hair Operator.
Editing modes
Edit Guides offers three ways to work with strands, which you combine freely:
- Root mode - select and manipulate strands by their roots on the surface.
- Strand (vertex) mode - select and reshape strands by their individual points.
- Brush mode - sculpt strands interactively with brush tools, the way you would comb real hair.
Brushes
In brush mode you choose a brush for each kind of edit - combing, rotating, scaling, cutting, lengthening, painting, grabbing, and more - and stroke over the strands to shape them. The brushes, their shapes, and their shared settings are documented in Brush Tools and Working with the Grooming Tools.
Groups and channels
Edit Guides is also where you assign data that drives the rest of the groom:
- Assign strand groups to split the groom into parts that other operators can target.
- Create and paint strand channels - per-strand or per-vertex values - to drive operator parameters and shading.
Where it fits
Place Edit Guides where you want hand edits to take effect in the stack. Edits are stored in the operator, so they remain part of the procedural history: operators below it still recompute, and operators above it act on your edited result. See The Operator Stack and Hair and Guides.