Saving and Loading Grooms
Your document in Ornatrix App is a groom. A saved groom captures your whole working session: references to imported geometry, the operator stack and node graph, cameras, and settings. You manage grooms from the File menu, much as you would documents in any other application.
The File menu
- New starts an empty groom. If the current groom has unsaved changes, you are prompted before it is discarded.
- New from Template starts from one of the bundled template grooms, giving you a ready-made starting point. See Grooms Browser.
- Open loads a groom from disk.
- Save and Save As write the current groom to a groom file.
- Recent Files lists grooms you have opened recently, with thumbnail previews so you can recognize them at a glance.
Groom thumbnails
When you save a groom, a small square thumbnail of the viewport is stored inside it and shown for the groom in the Recent Files menu and the Grooms Browser. By default this picture is taken from the current view. To control it, switch to the dedicated Thumbnail view once and frame the groom in it; from then on saving captures the thumbnail from that view no matter which view you are working in. See Orthographic Views and Cameras.
Groom file formats
When you save, you can choose between two formats:
- Compressed groom archive (
.oxz) - the default. This is a single, self-contained file that can optionally embed the assets your groom references (such as baked caches), so nothing goes missing when you move or share it. This is the recommended format for most work. See Editing Operator Properties for how to embed individual files. - Uncompressed groom (
.oxg.yaml) - a human-readable text format written as side-by-side files. This is useful when you want to inspect or version-control the groom's contents directly.
For compatibility, the App can also open the legacy .oxg.zip archive format used by earlier versions.
Referenced geometry is not duplicated
When a groom holds a cached copy of geometry that originally came from an external file - for example a baked mesh loaded from an Alembic (.abc) cache - the App avoids writing a second copy of that geometry into the saved groom whenever the source file can be recovered when the groom is reopened. If that file is embedded in the groom, or can be found through the search locations described below, only the reference is saved and the geometry is reloaded from the file on open. This keeps saved grooms small and keeps the referenced file as the single source of truth. If the source file cannot be resolved, the cached geometry is written into the groom instead, so nothing is ever lost.
Sharing grooms with other Ornatrix products
Because all versions of Ornatrix share the same grooming engine, a groom saved here can be opened in the Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and Unreal Engine versions of Ornatrix, and grooms from those products can be opened in the App. Saving as a self-contained .oxz archive with embedded assets is the most reliable way to hand a groom to someone else.
Holding a groom temporarily
Alongside saving to disk, the App can quickly stash the current groom and fetch it back later without managing a file. This is handy for trying a direction and returning to a known state. See Holding and Fetching Grooms.
Keeping references intact
If a groom references external files that are not embedded, the App resolves those references through a list of search locations when the groom is opened, and can rewrite paths to stay portable when you save. See Managing External File Paths.