Ephere has released a new version of Ornatrix for 3DS Max, the popular hair, fur and feathers plugin. Version 6 brings more speed and interactivity, several new features plus improvements to existing workflows, including:
- Optimized viewport hair rendering with speed improvements of up to 4x over V5.
- A new Moov Hair physics feature to simulate any type of hair, complex or simple.
- A Harmonic Oscillator modifier provides a quick and easy real-time way of simulating basic fur and hair dynamics.
- A Normalize modifier to fix intersecting hairs.
- A Clumping modifier with powerful features like per-clump management and clump patterns.
- A Braid object for usage together with clumping to generate braids.
- A Push Away From Surface modifier for accurate surface penetration fixing.
- A Resolve Collisions modifier to robustly keep hair away from an object, with animation controls.
- A Change Width modifier with a better way of controlling hair width.
- The ability to import Alembic hair from external assets with all information intact.
- An Adopt External Guides operator to use a separate guides object for controlling pre-modelled hair.
- Weaver and Weaver Pattern for generating woven hairs such as in rattan furniture, wire fences, or cloth.
- SeExpr support for generating strand data in flexible ways while being able to access internal strand information.
- Support for 3DS Max’s native Arnold renderer.
- Elastic brushes and editing modes to allow for easier modification of hair as a volume.
- Better optimized strand movement in Edit Guides, including automatic resampling.
- Direct isolation and editing of hairs.
- The ability to blend hairs which were grounded, allowing full control over their shapes.
- Procedural Animation recording directly to Alembic files.
- The automatic grounding of baked hair and multiplied hair.
- Ability to load up to 5 Alembic files into the same hair object at the same time.
- UV-base flow for hair from mesh strips.
- Ability to scale strands uniformly in Length modifier.
- New texture-based strand data generation method.
- Option to export per-vertex velocities to hair Alembic files.
Many more improvements are added, to see the full list visit the plugin’s documentation.
Perpetual workstation licenses cost USD$599 including unlimited render node licenses. Users who purchased a license after 1 July 2018 are entitled to a free upgrade and other existing users are offered a 50% upgrade discount dropping to 25% after 12 February 2019.
