"It's surprisingly easy to use!" - Jonfer Maia

Jonfer Maia is a very talented self-taught artist from Curitiba, Brazil. His work can be found on Behance website and his facebook page. Jonfer mainly specialises in cartooning, digital Art, and character Design. In this tutorial Jonfer will show you how he has done Little spartan kid's hair and cloth detail using Ephere Ornatrix .

• Facebook Art Page
• Portfolio

For this character I selected some of the faces I wanted the hair to grow from. I detached a few polygons as a new object to apply the Ornatrix modifier. I then added a "Ox strand Detail" with the default settings to have some smoother hairs.

With the hair modifier applied, I used the brush tool / Comb brush and the "cut brush" to stylize the hair the way I wanted.

In "Ox guides from surface" you can change the lenght of your hair on "guide parameters".You can also use the "Ornatrix strand Length" to do that which I did not need for this project.

Now it's time to use "Ox hair from guides". I kept "Random (area based) base distribution with the hair count in render as 1000 for each group I created. This part is a very experimental and you have to tweak these settings to get the amount of hair you want. Anything else here I kept as default.

For some hair groups I used the "Ox Strand Frizz"modifier with those settings just to get a very slight variation between some hairs. In "Outliers" I put a very small percentage of 0.04 and tweaked the frizz amount just to separate the hair a little bit. The hair style I wanted doesn't need much more than that so use those settings accordingly to your needs.

In "Ox Render Settings" I used a global radius of 0.02cm and changed the "spike" fallof from the root. That's it! Now it's time to apply some shader for this hair =D.

The hair shader is the "vrayhairmtl" with "Red shiny"preset and everything else as default. I "Unchecked" everything but "Use cached gi". Use Cached GI - this option is similar to the Use Irradiance Map option for the VRayMtl material; if it is disabled, the hair material will always be calculated with brute force GI. Chaos Group. Just select the hair group and click on "assign material to selection" to apply the shader.

For the eyebrows I have done the exact same thing as for the hair. I selected a polygon group to grow my hair from, I then cut and stylized it using the same brushes. I duplicated the shader in a new slot material and changed the primary specular settings a little bit. The "primary glossiness" with a smaller amount and also changed secondary specular color to make it darker. Select the eyebrows and apply the shader to it as we did for the hair.

As you can see in this image, I also used Ornatrix for the clothes. I only tweaked the hair length on "Ox guides from surface" modifier and changed the render count to 20.000 on "Ox hair from guides". That's you need to do in this part.

One last tip is to use Gi enabled with brute force as primary engine and Light cache for secondary engine. That way you get a nice quality in conjuction with a good render time.

That's it! Here is the final result with the render and some color correction in photoshop. I hope that helps you to get started using Ornatrix. Thanks!