Hair Clumping in Ornatrix App Beta, Part 1: Procedural Clumps, Collisions and Subclumps

How to Clump Hair in Ornatrix App Beta

Clumping is one of the steps that makes a 3D groom read as real hair. In this tutorial, Marsel Khadiyev walks through procedural clumping on a full groom in Ornatrix App Beta. It is part 1 of a two-part look at clumping: this video covers large-scale procedural clumps, and part 2 goes deeper into editing individual clumps.

Adding a Clump operator

There are two ways to start. You can type "clump" in the operator stack to add the Clump operator directly, or open the Clump tab on the toolbar and pick any of its tools, which adds the operator for you. By default the hair is split into 200 clumps, and the count updates dynamically in the viewport. You can also drive clump size with a density map or use external clump guides.

Input Shape vs Volume

Ornatrix App offers two clumping methods:

• Input Shape picks center hairs for each clump and pulls the rest toward them. Clumps stay closer to the original hair shape, and the algorithm evaluates a bit faster.
• Volume is the default. Clumps are still based on the input shapes, but with a better volumetric representation and more control.

Volume Collisions

When you move or reshape a clump, Volume Collisions decides how it interacts with its neighbors:

• None lets clumps intersect each other.
• Preserve Edits pushes neighboring clumps out of the way and restores them when you move your clump back.
• Adjust Volumes does the same, but keeps the changes made to other clumps as you keep editing. It costs a little performance, but collisions are calculated only against neighboring strands where possible.

The Clump Hairs tool

The Clump toolbar has four tools. The first one, Clump Hairs, works with individual hairs instead of whole clumps:

• Select hairs and clump them together to reassign them to a new clump.
• Use Unclump, or the Delete key, to remove clumping from selected hairs.
• Grow or shrink the selection with Shift + . and Shift + ,
• Use Select by Clump to grab every strand in a clump, then type a number to split it into two or more clumps.

Manual edits that survive procedural updates

Earlier, keeping hand-made clump changes meant turning off dynamic clumping. Now Ornatrix App recognizes your manual edits and keeps them in place, while the remaining clumps regenerate when you change the clump count or distribution.

Setup Procedural Subclumps

Subclumps can be built manually: add a clumping channel, add another Clump operator on top and use that channel as its region channel. The Setup Procedural Subclumps button does all of this for you, adding a second Clump operator with the settings already assigned. You are not limited to two levels.

What's next

Part 2 of this tutorial focuses on shaping and managing individual clumps in more detail.

Watch on YouTube: How to Clump Hair in Ornatrix App Beta (Part 1)