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.
Visibility
The Visibility rollup of the Edit Guides tool properties controls which strands are displayed while you work:
- Isolate Selected (I or Ctrl+Alt+Q) shows only the selected strands, hiding all the others on top of whatever is already hidden. This is a reversible toggle: its button stays lit while isolation is on, and running it again restores exactly the visibility you had before, so strands hidden with Hide Selected stay hidden. Isolation can be nested: with isolation on, select fewer strands and isolate again to narrow down further, then run it again without changing the selection to step back out one level at a time until isolation is off. Each step is a single undo entry. Isolation is a display state on top of hiding, so it never changes which strands you hid, and it is not saved with the scene.
- Hide Selected (Ctrl+H) hides the selected strands.
- Hide Unselected permanently hides every strand outside the selection. Unlike Isolate Selected this is reversed only by Unhide All.
- Unhide All (Ctrl+U) reveals all hidden strands.
Outside the Edit Guides tool the same shortcuts apply to scene geometry instead, see Keyboard Shortcuts.
Inputs
Edit Guides takes its strands from the hair or guides wired into it. With no hair input it draws its guides from scratch on the mesh wired into its Distribution Mesh input, which is how a graft surface such as a scalp fitted with a graft groom is groomed by hand: pick the Groom operator and start drawing with the Draw Strands Tool, and the Edit Guides is created on top of the graft surface.
The Character Mesh input is for the case where the distribution mesh is only the part of the character which grows hair. Connect the complete character to it and the guides know where the rest of the body is: the Draw Strands tool keeps drawn guides along it, and operators and tools which look for the character mesh use it instead of the distribution mesh. When an Edit Guides is created on top of a Groom operator's graft surface, the mesh the Groom is fitted to is connected to this input automatically.
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.