Porting native Hair and Fur to Ornatrix

Overview

This page explains the process of porting Max's Hair and Fur modifier to Ornatrix hair. This allows you to use all Ornatrix's hair modeling capabilities in your old native Hair and Fur grooms.

Ornatrix can generate hairs or hair guides splines . This is very useful because if we can convert a hair object made by any other hair plugin to splines, then we can use it in Ornatrix. You can either port the whole hair object to splines to make a one to one replica as an Ornatrix hair object, or port the hair guides only and use Ornatrix's hair interpolation capabilities to build your groom. In both cases you can build up the resulting groom using Ornatrix modifiers.

Porting the Guides

To convert native Hair and Fur to splines:

Select the Hair and Fur modifier of your hair object in the modifier stack,
Make sure that none of the selection modes are active,
Expand the Tools tab and use the Guides -> Splines command.

This will convert only the guides of the native Hair and Fur to splines. These guides can then be used to interpolate Ornatrix hair.

To generate Ornatrix hair from those guides:

Select the guides and click Quick Hair / Add Hair to Selection button on the Ornatrix toolbar,
Select the Hair from Curves preset on the Select Groom popup window.

This will generate a new Ornatrix hair object with three modifiers:

Guides from Shape Modifier: This modifier generates Ornatrix hair guides from the splines.
Ground Strands Modifier: Grounds to roots of the hair guides to a polygon mesh. It is useful to attach the hair object to your character.
Change Width Modifier: Determines the width of the hair strands. It will be useful later when we interpolate hairs from the guides.

To be able to interpolate Ornatrix hairs from those guides, we need to give Ornatrix a distribution mesh. This is the polygon mesh of your character. To do so:

In Guides from Shape, set the* Number of Points* to match the amount of guide points in your original Hair and Fur object. The default is 10 points but this can be changed later. If changed later, the guide roots need to be re-grounded in Ground Strands as described below.
Go to Ground Strands and use to* Base Surface* button to enter picking mode and pick your character mesh from the viewport,
Click Roots Detached to disable this function and attach the roots (Blue is enabled, Gray is disabled). You can detach the roots later if you want to replace the distribution mesh.
Add Hair from Guides modifier to interpolate hair strands from the guides.
If you had any distribution/density mask map connected to your native Hair and Fur object to define the hair distribution area, you need to reconnect it to Ornatrix's* Hair from Guides* in the Distribution Map slot. That's it! Start adding Ornatrix hair modifiers to build up your groom.

Porting the Hairs

Porting the whole hair object is a bit simpler. In this case we don't need hair interpolation, just a* one to one* port of the native Hair and Fur object.
To convert the whole native Hair and Fur to splines:

Select the Hair and Fur modifier of your hair object in the modifier stack,
Make sure that none of the selection modes are active,
Expand the Tools tab and use the Hair -> Splines command.

This will convert the whole native Hair and Fur to splines.

To generate Ornatrix hair from those splines:

Select the splines and click Quick Hair / Add Hair to Selection button on the Ornatrix toolbar,
Select the Hair from Curves preset on the Select Groom popup window.

As described above, this will set up the basic modifiers to get your started, but this time we don't need hair interpolation.

As before, set the Number of Points in Guides from Shape,
Attach the roots to your character mesh in Ground Strands,
Add Hair from Guides to generate hairs, but this time switch the Root Distribution Method from "Even" to Guides as Hair. This removes the hair interpolation and ensures that Ornatrix creates a hair strand for each spline in the native Hair and Fur object, giving you a one to one replica of your groom.

Note: When using Guides as Hair as Root Distribution method the Hair Count parameters in Hair from Guides will not have any effect. This is because the hair strand amount of the generated Ornatrix hair object will be equal to the native Hair and Fur object.

Missing Something? Let us know if this page needs more information about the topic.