Interactive Hair Sculpting

 
 
 
Posted by:anton.gg@gmail.com
Data created:30 September 2017

I've been playing with the demo version of Ornatrix and really like it. However, I couldn't find a way to sculpt on the hair directly, like xgen interactive grooming allows you to. I can style the hair using guides, but then I can't do overlapping strands in messy hairstyles and such, which you can fairly easily achieve using xgen's direct sculpting. I assume you could probably achieve similar results by using strand groups in Ornatrix, but it feels like direct sculpting on hair would be a much more artist friendly way of doing it. With the awesomely robust toolset that Ornatrix has right now, it seems like hair sculpting functionality is actually missing from the plugin. Is direct brush grooming of hair in the roadmap?

Hello, thank you for your interest in Ornatrix and its features. Hair sculpting is something we are considering and discussed numerous times. It will likely not appear in V2, which is about to start Beta in a few days, but in the next version after that.

Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.)

Thanks Marsel. Encouraging news! I'll keep experimenting in the meantime :)

Hi, just testing Beta 2 now and its got a lot of potential.  Just want to add my 2 cents that interactive hair sculpting is very important part these days.  The sooner this is available the better.  :)    So far seems like a interesting workflow and everything is quite intuitive.  But the ability to work as both a guide based and direct hair manipulation system would make this a serious contender for Xgen IGS.

Thank you for weighing in. It is really encouraging to hear this, and we'll consider the edit hair operator in some more detail. It was always on the TODO, question is how urgent. There are so many other things to address as well.

Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.)

Thanks Marsel.  Great to hear.  The Edit Hair Operator sounds good.  If  I am getting what you mean, its a way to directly manipulate any of the instance hair.  With brush and direct moving I am assuming or just brush based?  Would love to see it.

Basically in terms of my experience so far, I just open up beta 2 the other day, first time using Ornatirx, did not look at the docs at all.  And after about 20 - 30 min playing around, I can start working with the system and have a good idea of where most parts are and how to manipulate and create my groom.  Of course not to every detail of every operator but the design is very clear of the base, guide editing, distribution, render editing... etc.  So great job on the overall design and workflow design of the tool.

Only thing I stumble on was i first tested on 2015, which there are a lot of missing things.  Which I assume beta 2 does not really support.  In 2017 i could not get it to render with Arnold and later found on the forum you mention its Arnold 5 and above from here on out.  So updated Arnold and everything seem to have worked.

 

I might have more questions regarding the API, how open it is to develop on and create a custom pipeline around..  and how open is it to access to the internal hair data efficently.  Do you have an email I can send to you directly about all this?

Thank you Simon. Yes, you are correct about the idea of manipulating hair directly. In V2 beta we've started exploring this concept with the new Clump node, where you can select and clump "final" hairs directly. This works despite the resolution at which you're viewing the hair inside the viewport (you can be looking at 10% or 100% of final render hairs, the more you have the more detail you can specify).

Glad to hear you're finding Ornatrix intuitive to explore, we strive to push this type of discoverability in our design. We're currently fixing some of the remaining issues with 2015, AFAIK it should be working mostly fine there, so it'd be good to know which parts aren't working for you.

We have a pretty solid header-only API which you can grab here: https://ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/maya/ornatrix/OrnatrixSDK.zip

I can also send you our full suite of Python unit tests (there are about 230 at the moment) which cover most of the functionality and are a good way to see how to tap into Ornatrix through pymel. Also, I am available to answer any questions as always. Feel free to email me at marsel.khadiyev (at) ephere.com anytime.

Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.)