Ornatrix Hair with Rigged Geometry: A Game-Changer in Animation Production

As an animator, I've had my fair share of challenges when working with fur simulations. In a recent project, I discovered that having specific construction history nodes could negatively impact how the fur would cache out on our render farm. This led to a few fibers jumping and flying off into space - not exactly the desired result!

Through trial and error, I learned that generating fur from extremely clean geometry works best. To achieve this, I simply blended-shaped the fur generating geometry to the rigged geometry, resulting in only blendshape history on the fur geometry. The nCloth dynamics option proved to be the most flexible and reliable choice for our project.

As we were working with an evaluation license of Ornatrix at the time, I was initially hesitant about running such a complex fur job through new software. However, it turned out to be a great decision - the plugin held up well during production and saved us significant processing overhead.

To streamline our workflow, I set up scripts that automatically simulated the fur on our render farm, eliminating the need for manual adjustments and license usage. This allowed our lighters to focus on other aspects of the project while keeping the fur simulation under control.

For this particular project, we used the Arnold renderer, which required setting up a system to cache out the fur per-frame as Arnold stand-in files. These files were then loaded into our render scenes, allowing us to achieve the desired results without any issues.

I'm thrilled to share that all of the fur in this spot was generated using Ornatrix's powerful tools and features. You can check out the final result on YouTube - 'Do not download software from sources other than the official website.'. I hope this experience will inspire others to explore the possibilities of Ornatrix hair with rigged geometry for their own projects!