Working with the Grooming Tools
Alongside the procedural operators, Ornatrix App provides interactive tools for shaping a groom directly in the viewport. Where operators describe an effect with parameters, tools let you work by hand - brushing, drawing, combing, and painting - the way you would style real hair. Most hand editing is done through the Edit Guides Operator, with the active tool's options shown in the Tool Properties panel.
Choosing a tool
Select a tool to start working interactively; its settings then appear in the Tool Properties panel. The main tools are:
- Brush tools - a family of brushes for combing, cutting, lengthening, smoothing, grabbing, and more. See Brush Tools.
- Draw Strands tool - plant and draw new guides directly on the surface. See Draw Strands Tool.
- Surface Comb tool - place and adjust the directional sinks that steer surface combing. See Surface Comb Tool.
- Hair Parting tool - lay out and edit partings on the surface. See Hair Parting Tool.
- Paint Texture tool - paint texture maps directly in the viewport. See Paint Texture Tool.
- Edit Texture tool - visualize the output of a texture operator on the distribution mesh. See Edit Texture Tool.
- Edit Mesh tool - select and transform the faces, edges and vertices of a polygon mesh. See Edit Mesh Tool.
- Moov tool - show the state of a Moov physics simulation in the viewport. See Moov Tool.
Tools and the stack
Interactive edits are recorded in operators, so they remain part of the procedural history. Brushing in Edit Guides Operator, for instance, stores your strokes in that operator: the stack below still recomputes, and operators above still act on your edited result. This means hand work and procedural work coexist - you can comb by hand and then add a Frizz Operator on top, and revisit either at any time.
Selection and visibility
While grooming you will often want to work on part of a groom. The App provides commands to select strands, select by strand group, invert and clear selections, and to hide, freeze, and isolate parts of the groom so you can focus on what you are editing. See Working with Strand Groups.
Clicking in the viewport selects the single item under the cursor; a strand is picked only where it is drawn, not beside it. Where several items overlap, click again at the same spot to cycle to the next one, starting from the nearest (for scene objects, the frontmost, including objects hidden behind others). Ctrl+click adds the next item under the cursor that is not selected yet, and Shift+click removes one of the selected ones. Dragging a rectangle, circle or lasso still selects everything inside it.