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.
With the Select Scene Geometry tool active, the selected object shows a transform gizmo which moves, rotates or scales it in the mode chosen on the toolbar. Holding Shift while dragging a gizmo handle clones the selection first and drags the clone, leaving the original in place, as in 3ds Max. When you release, a dialog asks how the clone should relate to the original: an instance shares the original's operator stack, so editing the operators of either object changes both, while a copy gets an independent copy of the whole stack. Tick Don't ask again to keep answering the same way. Pressing Escape during the drag, or cancelling the dialog, removes the clone, and the whole gesture undoes as one step.
Right-click a gizmo handle to choose the coordinate space it works in (World, Parent or Local) and to change its Size. The size applies to the gizmo in every viewport and is remembered between sessions. It is also available as Transform manipulator size on the Viewports tab of Settings.
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.
All three properties panels - Operator, Groom and Tool Properties - have a Filter by name box under their header. Type part of a name to show only the matching properties; typing a group's name keeps the whole group. The box turns yellow while a filter is active. Click the x at its right end, or press Esc while typing in it, to clear it. In a panel whose properties are split into categories, such as most operators, the filter shares the row of category buttons: it is folded into a filter button at the right end of the row until you click it, and folds back into the button once you leave it empty. While it is open, the category buttons show only their icons; hover over one to see its name.
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 Cameras View
The Cameras view lists the scene's cameras and the standard views and switches the viewport to one with a click, showing each camera's image plane or what it sees. See Orthographic Views and Cameras.
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.
The Status Bar
The Status Bar along the bottom of the window shows the active tool and statistics of the selection. Work which runs in the background while you carry on, such as training an AI Physics operator or a simulation filling its cache, is listed at its right for as long as it runs, whichever tool you switch to: a spinner, the job's name, a progress bar, and an X which cancels it. Hover over a job to see what it is doing now, and click it to go back to where it can be followed in detail, such as the AI Physics tool for a training run. The same progress shows on the application's taskbar button.
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.
At the right-hand end of the main menu bar is a Discord button, which opens the Ornatrix community Discord server in your browser.
The toolbar is divided into tabs by subject: Groom, Clump, Texture, Physics, Polygons and Render. Each tab starts with the buttons which bring something new into the scene, such as a groom preset on the Groom tab, a sphere or a Human on the Polygons tab, or a camera on the Render tab, and goes on to the tools which edit what is there. A button which creates something carries a small + in its bottom right corner.
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.
Any drag can be cancelled while its mouse button is still held: press Escape, or click the right mouse button. Whatever the drag changed is put back, whether it was a camera orbit or pan, a gizmo move, a brush stroke or a change of brush size or strength, an orbited light, a node moved or a box selection in the Node Graph, a scrub or pan on the Timeline, or a resized property column. The drag then does nothing more until you release the button. A drag zoom uses the right button itself, so only Escape cancels it. The Cancel key can be changed like any other shortcut.
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 here. Anactionor atoolgivencreate: trueshows the + of a button which creates somethinggroup- a whole set of buttons which the application defines rather than this file:create_generated_groomfor hair generated from a picture or a video,create_generated_meshfor a mesh generated from a description or a picture,create_geometryfor the sphere, plane and cylinder,create_characterfor the Human body and the MetaHuman head,create_renderfor the camera and the light, andcreate_forcesfor the forces acting on a simulation, such as Wind. Every button of a group shows the + of a button which creates somethingdropdown- 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
A group stands for however many buttons the application currently puts in it, placed where you write it. Those same lists build the Create menu, so a tab using them always offers exactly what the menu does, and a generator added in a later version appears on your toolbar without you having to name it.
A tab can also give number_keys_from, naming the button its number keys 1 to 9 and 0 start at, written like an item (for example tool: edit_strands on the line below it), so that the buttons before it have no number key. number_keys_from: none puts none of the tab's buttons on the number keys, and a tab without it starts them at its first button. The shipped Groom, Physics and Polygons tabs start them past their create buttons. See Keyboard Shortcuts.
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.