Strand Groups
Overview
A strand group is an integer value assigned to each guide or hair strand. Strands belonging to a specific group can be edited separately by various Ornatrix operators. Various Ornatrix operators provide an option to specify the group index which it will apply to. You can use multiple operators stacked on top of each other to separately style hairs belonging to different groups.
For example, you can have half of your character's hairs belong to group 1 and another half to group 2. Two render settings operators can then be added, one which works on group 1 and another on group 2. One operator can change the first half of the hairs width to be thinner while the second operator can change the second half of the hair to be thicker.
Specifying strand groups
The most typical way to specify strand groups is to do it on guides. To do this:- In edit guides operator add a new per-root channel and name it "Groups"
- Select one or more guides in root selection mode
- Change the value of the newly created "Groups" channel for these guides to the group's index (ex. 1)
If you are using hair from mesh strips operator, you can use the per-strip controls to directly specify group index for individual strips.
Using strand groups
When using various hair operators in Ornatrix you can specify Strand Group parameter to them.
The value of this parameter will determine which hair or guide strands the operator will be applied to. A value of 0 will apply the operator to all strands which do not have a group assigned. In other words, 0 is the default strand group index.