"Ornatrix is hands-down the most powerful hair solution currently on the market for 3dsMax. It truly excels with its speed, great modifiers, spline and shader integration, plus flexibility with features like MassFX and cloth dynamics. It rocks!" - Francisco A. Cortina

Francisco A. Cortina has been a professional 3D artist in the Visual Effects and Animation industries since 1995. He has worked as both a production artist and supervisor with experience in Modeling, Rigging, Animation, Lighting and Compositing. He was previously a Modeling Supervisor at Digital Domain, Character Technical Director at Dreamworks Animation and Senior 3D Artist and Animator at Square USA/Square-Enix.

In 2005 he began operating as an independent contractor and formed his company Cortina Digital, offering 3D character development, consulting and outsourcing services to companies in the VFX, Animation and Video Game industries.

I was tasked by my client, Blur Studio, to create a variation of the "Pouf" hair style for Assassin"s Creed Unity. The hair style was made famous by the Queen of France in the 18th century, Marie Antoinette. To achieve such a challenging hairstyle, good planning of hair layers paired with clever use of procedural modifiers and hand-crafted spline guides were absolutely essential.

The first step after modeling the flower and pin decorations was to create a temporary hair "cap" from the head mesh. From this, an initial set of hair guides were generated and a quick groom pass using Ox Edit Guides "brush" hair combing was done. This was a great way to quickly define the overall shape of the hair style to match the reference imagery.

The next phase was to plan out the hair caps and where the major hair spline layers would be grown from. Due to the complexity and varying degrees of clumping, waviness, direction, etc., it was broken up into sections as follows: inner hair, rear hair, front hair, bangs, sideburns and dangly hair. Most styles also require an extra hair layer, that is separate from the rest, to control the stray or wild hairs that stick out.

To properly achieve a controlled hair flow, a combination of hand combed guides and hair + strand clusters, in addition to some slight curling was needed. Small textures were then used to delineate the hair zones and control the intensities of the clustering, curling, density, etc. Because the hair was also quite long and curled, it was important to have separate cluster controls for the root areas vs. the middle or ends of the hair. Having individual control over these elements was crucial in being able to achieve the look successfully.

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