The Operator Stack
The Operator Stack is where grooming happens in Ornatrix App. It shows the list of operators applied to the selected object, and lets you add, remove, reorder, and adjust them. Because the stack is non-destructive, every step remains editable: you can go back to any operator at any time, change its settings, or move it, and the rest of the groom updates automatically.
How the stack is evaluated
The stack is evaluated from the bottom up. The operator at the bottom produces the initial hair or guides, and each operator above it receives the result of the operators below and transforms it further. For example, a typical stack might start with Guides from Mesh at the bottom to grow guides on a surface, then Hair from Guides to interpolate dense hair, then styling operators such as Frizz, Clump, and Curl stacked on top. Reordering operators changes the result, because each one acts on whatever the operators beneath it produced.
For the underlying ideas - what an operator is, and the difference between guides and hair - see Objects and the Operator Stack and Hair and Guides.
Adding operators
Use the stack's Add Operator control to insert a new operator. The new operator is added relative to the current selection in the stack, so you can build your groom in a deliberate order. Operators are grouped by what they do, mirroring the categories in this documentation: creation, styling, animation, and rendering.
Managing operators
From the stack you can:
- Select an operator to edit its parameters in the Editing Operator Properties panel.
- Reorder operators to change the order of evaluation.
- Enable or disable an operator temporarily, to compare results or isolate a step without deleting it, using its on/off toggle in the stack. When several operators are selected, clicking the on/off toggle of any one of them switches the whole selection together, and pressing Ctrl+D toggles the enabled state of all the selected operators at once. Either change counts as a single undo step.
- Delete an operator you no longer need.
Choosing what the viewport shows
While you groom, the viewport can show the output of the operator you are focused on, the final result of the whole stack, or both at once. This is controlled by the Operator Stack Display button at the top of the stack, which offers three modes:
- Focused - show only the output of the operator currently selected in the stack. Operators above the selection do not contribute, so you see exactly what the focused operator produces. This is convenient while editing an operator in the middle of the stack.
- Final - show only the final output of the whole stack, whichever operator is selected. Use this to judge the finished groom while still keeping an operator selected for editing.
- Both - show the focused operator's output normally, with the final result of the stack drawn faded (ghosted) over it, so you can see your current step in the context of the finished groom. This is the default.
Click the button to open a menu and choose a mode directly, or press its shortcut to cycle through the three modes. Each mode also has its own shortcut, and the same modes are available from the View menu. See Keyboard Shortcuts.
The stack and the node graph
The Operator Stack presents your groom as a single linear pipeline, which is the most direct way to work for most grooms. For setups that need branching or reuse - feeding one result into several places, or merging several inputs - the same groom can be edited as a network in the The Node Graph. The stack and the graph are two views of the same underlying groom.