The Ornatrix App Workspace
When you launch Ornatrix App you are presented with a dockable workspace made up of several panels arranged around a central 3D viewport. Every panel can be moved, resized, tabbed, floated, or hidden, so you can build a layout that suits your task and your screen. This page introduces each part of the interface; the linked pages cover them in depth.
The Viewport
The Viewport is the central real-time view of your scene, rendered on the GPU with Vulkan. It shows your base meshes, guides, and hair as you work. You can navigate it with orbit, pan, and zoom controls, switch between perspective and orthographic projections, and look through any camera in the scene. See Viewport Navigation and Display and Orthographic Views and Cameras for details, and Multiple Viewport Windows if you want more than one viewport open at once.
The Operator Stack
The Operator Stack is the heart of grooming in Ornatrix. It lists the operators applied to the selected object, evaluated from bottom to top, with each operator transforming the hair produced by the ones below it. From here you add, remove, reorder, enable, and disable operators. Because the stack is non-destructive, you can revisit and re-tune any step at any time. See The Operator Stack and Objects and the Operator Stack.
The Node Graph
For more complex setups, the Node Graph exposes the same grooming pipeline as a network of connected nodes, letting you branch, merge, and reuse results in ways a linear stack cannot. The stack and the graph are two views of the same underlying scene. See The Node Graph.
Operator and Groom Properties
When you select an operator, its parameters appear in the Operator Properties panel, where you edit values, curves, ramps, and texture maps. The Groom Properties panel exposes settings for the groom as a whole. See Editing Operator Properties.
Tool Properties
When an interactive grooming tool is active - a brush, the Surface Comb, the Draw Strands tool - its settings appear in the Tool Properties panel. See Working with the Grooming Tools.
The Timeline
The Timeline controls the current frame and playback for animated scenes and dynamics simulations such as Moov physics. See The Timeline and Playback.
The Python Console
The Console gives you an interactive Python prompt for inspecting the scene, scripting repetitive tasks, and automating grooms. See Scripting with the Python Console.
Menus, Toolbars, and Shortcuts
Common actions are available from the main menu and toolbars, and almost everything can be driven from the keyboard. The full, customizable mapping is documented in Keyboard Shortcuts.
A toolbar button is dimmed when its command cannot be used at the moment, outlined while it is the active tool or an option which is switched on, and underlined when it applies to the operator you currently have focused. The underline is a hint rather than a restriction: every tool stays available, and picking one which does not apply to the focused operator simply moves the focus to something it can work on.
Rearranging the toolbar
The toolbar's tabs and their contents are read from a text file rather than being fixed, so the toolbar can be rearranged to suit the way you work. The arrangement which ships with the application is Default.toolbar.yaml, in the Toolbar folder of the Ornatrix App data directory, next to Themes. Do not edit that file, because it is replaced whenever you upgrade; copy it to User.toolbar.yaml in the same folder instead, and the application uses yours in its place.
The always block holds the buttons which stay on the row whichever tab is selected: leading at the left-hand end, trailing at the right. The transform and selection modes live there because they apply to whatever you are doing rather than to one tab's subject, and so does the render mode toggle. The leading group is drawn on a slightly tinted background and divided from the rest of the row, so it reads as its own area.
Every tab needs a key, which is its internal name and also what is remembered as the tab you were last working in, and a label, which is the text shown on the tab itself. Renaming a tab means changing its label; leave its key alone, or the application will no longer recognize the tab you were last working in.
A tab can also show a small icon before its label. Give it icon to use one of the application's own icons, named the same way the buttons below name theirs, or glyph to use a character - paste the character itself, since the file is read as UTF-8. A tab given both shows its icon. The tab's items are drawn from left to right, and each one is:
action- a button which runs a command, optionally with aniconnaming the picture to draw on ittool- a button which selects a grooming tool; tools carry their own icons and number keys, so neither is written heredropdown- one of the built-in click-and-hold buttons, eithertransform_modeorselection_modeseparator- a dividing rule between two groups of buttonsspring- takes up the remaining width, so that everything after it sits at the right-hand end of the row
If your file cannot be read, or an entry in it is not recognized, the application falls back to the arrangement it was built with and describes the problem in the Console, so an editing mistake can never leave you without a toolbar.
Saving your work
Your document in Ornatrix App is a groom. Saving it with File > Save writes a groom file that captures your whole working session - imported geometry references, the operator stack, cameras, and settings. The default format is the compressed .oxz archive, which can optionally embed referenced assets so the groom is self-contained and easy to share with other Ornatrix products.
See Saving and Loading Grooms for the file formats and the File menu, and Grooms Browser for starting from a preset.