Hair Plugin Recommendation

[Nearl]

3ds Max Hair&Fur tool seems dated and has a few bugs associated with it. I literally can't recall Autodesk updating it in the past 10yrs.

I'm curious what the rest of you use. Hair Farm, Ornatrix or Other? Do these come with their own host of issues?

Thanks for your time

[Moriah]

We have both in here, but both have problems in certain areas. Hairfarm is better for grooming but awful for simulations. Ornatrix better with sims but crashes a lot, grooming is not as good. Both don't work well with feather systems, ornatrix has better integration with vray, as is a tad faster when rendering with my experience.
Both have their flaws, but if i had to opt for one i would go with ornatrix.

[mrhalaby]

we had a lot of crashing with Hairfarm, but Ornatrix went really well. I've read the new version has improved the grooming tools a lot, but have to try it myself yet.

[flipbook]

We had Hair Farm for the last 3 years... nightmare on the farm! Switched to ornatrix a few weeks ago... it just works so far

[DaveKW]

We use both but I've not really used Ornatrix properly yet, but some of the initial differences I've noticed are:

- With Hair Farm you can apply the hair to the actual mesh, Ornatrix creates an Instance of that mesh and sets it to not renderable. This could be an issue if you're rigging or use point caches etc.
- Hair Farm has the shader assigned in the modifier, so if you have multiple hair generators on one mesh you have to assign the shader to each one. With Ornatrix you assign the shader to it as you would any other object.
- Hair Farm seems a lot less stable than Ornatrix...in my limited Ornatrix experience.

[FSGFX]

i never used ornatrix... how does it deal with displaced geo..?

[mrhalaby]

we have animated geometry and the ornatrix copy has an instanced point cache modifier so it works kind of seamlessly. For the displaced geometry my guess is, as long as you set the displace modifiers below the ornatrix ones, it should be ok.

[kagemaru]

We have them both as others here.
As said, they have pros and cons.
In my experience hairfarm grooming excels when you need a very specific hair/fur element, compact hairs or short fur for example because its mesh edit method can be more predictable and uniform to model.
When you need a more "liberal" approach, with longer hair or more complex fur parts, then ornatrix can achieve better results imho. I'd say with ornatrix it's easier to model more realistic grooms.
There is one major issue with hairfarm though, and it's about deformation: in several cases guides interpolation just goes nuts and gives terrible results. With had to regroom in ornatrix several characters, and Cem told us it wasn't able to fix it (it's still an ongoing bug as far as i know).
Related to this i would be more confident about ornatrix future against hairfarm, the latter seams to me going towards an end. Its development looks almost stuck in the last couple of years apart from minor fixes and 3ds compatibility.

[Nearl]

Thank you everyone for your comments...much appreciated!