How to Build a Custom Dreadlock Hair Card Groom in Ornatrix App
How to Build a Custom Dreadlock Hair Card Groom in Ornatrix App
In the previous Ornatrix App tutorial we covered hair cards and how to pick from the built-in preset grooms in the hair card atlas. This time I wanted to go one level deeper and show how to build a completely new hair card groom from scratch, one you can reuse just like any of the built-in presets. The example I picked is a dread, since dreads come in enough variations that it is worth having a flexible, reusable base rather than a single fixed look.
Why Dreads Need a Different Starting Point
Ornatrix App ships with two hair card start scenes: a flat card, which represents a thin layer of hair on a plane, and a round card, built on a cylindrical base. Most dread references collect volume rather than sitting flat, so the round start scene is the better base for this groom.
Shaping the Dread with Clump
The first operator added to the stack is Clump. Dynamic clumping is enabled and set to a single clump per card, since most use cases only need one dread per hair card, though the count can be raised later for multiple dreads on one card. The clump amount is set to be fairly even along the strand with a slight taper at the ends, matching the tapering seen in most dread references. A heavy twist, around 3000 radians with the ramp set to full, produces the classic twisted-strand look throughout the whole length.
Adding Texture with Frizz
A Frizz operator adds the larger, irregular bumps found in real dreads. Outlier percentage and amount are reduced from their defaults so a few stray hairs still escape the main shape without looking chaotic, and the frizz scale is adjusted until the bumps read as a pattern instead of noise. A second Frizz layer, added after Clump, handles finer detail and gives the dread a more disordered, less uniform feel. To get enough resolution for this fine detail, the strand segment count is raised from 200 to 500 points per strand in the guide generation settings.
Coloring the Strands
Color comes from a Strand Data Generator set up as a Set Color operator, driving a per-vertex RGB channel instead of the default grayscale value. The color source is switched from a constant to a gradient texture, with the texture projection axis changed from UV to UW so the gradient runs along the strand from root to tip instead of across it. A second, noise-driven texture is layered into the base color slot to turn a small number of strands gray, with the noise low and high values and scale adjusted until the ratio of gray to black strands looks natural.
Exposing Reusable Parameters
With the shape, texture and color in place, the groom's parameters are exposed so the whole thing becomes editable without opening the operator stack. Ornatrix App's Auto option can populate this parameter list automatically. It can call an AI agent for this, which needs a Claude API key and takes a few minutes to run through the groom and pick out parameters such as random seed, length, thickness and hair count. The result can be edited afterward, for example removing a parameter that turned out to be redundant, and refined further by describing in words what should change.
Saving Reusable Variations
Once the parameters are exposed, the same groom can be pushed into different looks by adjusting those parameters and saving each result as a named preset. This tutorial ends with three: the default frizzy version with the gray/gradient color, a smooth variation, and a fuzzy variation. Saving the groom file into the hair cards directory rather than a personal user folder is what makes it show up as a selectable variation back in the main hair cards scene, alongside the other built-in presets. From there, switching the hair card shape from cylindrical to ribbon and enabling the face camera option makes the cards behave more like a game-ready hair card asset.
Where This Fits
The result is a dread hair card groom that behaves exactly like the other presets in the hair card atlas: select it, pick a variation, and reuse it across characters instead of building the look from zero every time. The full walkthrough, including every operator setting shown here, is in the video below.
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