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For those who don’t know the tool: Ephere develops Ornatrix as a procedural hair, fur and feather system across 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine. Ornatrix for Cinema 4D places strand generation, grooming, simulation, meshing and interchange inside the Cinema 4D stack, with Alembic providing a route to other DCCs and Unreal Engine and native hair rendering documented for Arnold, Redshift and Corona.
Roots get their own traffic control
Ephere has expanded its Ornatrix for Cinema 4D grooming system with new controls for root distribution, clumping, strand extension, hair-to-mesh conversion and texture generation. The update also adds workflow changes specific to Cinema 4D, including a redesigned groom-creation dialog, support for Cinema 4D 2026 and a native Apple Silicon build.
Ephere describes the release as bringing the feature set of its current 3ds Max and Maya implementations into Cinema 4D while adding host-specific workflow improvements. Ornatrix remains based around a non-destructive operator stack for constructing, modifying and simulating strand-based grooms.
The most distinctive new operator is Warp Roots. It changes the spatial distribution of strand roots without requiring artists to manually relocate every guide. Artists can bunch roots together or spread them apart by painting a density channel, while the modifier exposes Strength, Iterations and Resolution controls.
The density input can also be driven by texture maps, strand groups, guide channels and mesh vertex colours. Internally, Ephere documents the Iterations parameter as controlling the number of Jacobi iterations used to solve the distribution, while Resolution sets the grid resolution used for the computation.
Particularly for feathers and sparse fur, where the distribution of roots can be as important as the direction of the finished strands. A feather groom often requires deliberately organised root placement rather than a statistically pleasant carpet of follicles. Warp Roots turns that placement into a controllable stage in the operator stack instead of making it primarily a manual guide-editing problem.
Curves now do more steering
Existing grooming operators also gain additional controls. Surface Comb can use curved sinks drawn on the character surface to determine hair flow. Rather than restricting the artist to simpler directional controls, those curves can direct, repel or attract surrounding strands.
The Length workflow similarly gains curved extensions. Hair can be extended along a curve instead of simply increasing strand length along its existing trajectory. For grooming work that requires long locks, whiskers or other strongly art-directed silhouettes, that is a more useful distinction than another percentage slider labelled “more hair”.
Clumping receives more direct editing controls too. New manipulators let artists move, rotate and scale clumps at positions along their length, preserving the procedural clump operation while exposing more local intervention. Ephere has also added clump-pattern knots for generating braided structures along a clump.
Paint goes through the decal
The Edit Guides toolset also gains texture and decal painting. Artists can use the paint brush to project texture information onto the hair, making it possible to apply graphic patterns and other colour variation directly in the grooming workflow.
This is separate from the new mesh texture-generation process. One concerns authoring data on the groom, while the other concerns generating textures in conjunction with converting strands to mesh geometry. Keeping those jobs distinct matters because a strand colour attribute and a raster texture destined for a polygon card are not interchangeable production assets.
The new colour workflow also connects to Unreal Engine through Ornatrix’s Alembic exporter. When Unreal export is enabled, Ornatrix can write per-strand groom colour to an attribute named groom_color. Ephere states that Unreal’s groom importer recognises that attribute, allowing colour authored in Ornatrix to be read by the hair shader after import.
The Alembic exporter can additionally write strand positions and animation, widths, texture coordinates, channel data, strand IDs and optional velocities where those components are present and selected for export. It can output static hair or animation ranges and offers separate viewport and render representations.
Groom browsing learns the context
Cinema 4D-specific workflow work includes a new Create Groom dialog. It displays groom thumbnails and filters available grooms according to whether they apply to the currently selected base objects. It is a modest interface change compared with root warping or hair-card generation, but one with straightforward production consequences. Preset libraries become less useful as they grow if the artist has to remember which assets are compatible with which source geometry. Context filtering moves part of that housekeeping into the interface.
The Merge modifier also gains overlap resolution and blending for overlapping hair. This targets another relatively unglamorous part of building larger grooms: combining independently created regions without preserving visibly problematic intersections at their boundaries.
Cinema 4D 2026, with deployment details
Version 4 supports Cinema 4D R25.010 and newer through Cinema 4D 2026 on both Windows and macOS. Ephere states that it officially supports the latest revision of each major Cinema 4D version rather than guaranteeing operation on every individual host build. The operating-system baseline is Windows 10 or newer and macOS 13 Ventura or newer. On Windows, the software also requires the Visual C++ 2022 runtime.
Ephere has added a native Apple Silicon build, so current ARM-based Macs no longer need to run the plug-in through Rosetta. The developer also states that Windows and macOS installers are now digitally signed, with the macOS packages notarised by Apple. For Cinema 4D 2025.3 and newer, Ephere has moved the build system to CMake. That change is primarily a deployment and development detail rather than an feature, but it is relevant to studios maintaining controlled plug-in installations across multiple host generations.
Renderers remain two different cases
Ephere documents native Ornatrix support in Cinema 4D for Arnold, Redshift and Corona. The degree of strand-data support is not identical between them. For Arnold, Ephere lists hair UVs, per-strand UVs and strand-channel export. Redshift supports hair UVs, per-strand UVs and per-strand strand-channel data. Corona is documented for hair UVs and per-strand UVs.
Other renderers are handled differently. Ephere states that renderers without native Ornatrix support, including Octane, Cinema 4D Physical Render and V-Ray, can render the result after Ornatrix hair is converted to polygon meshes or spline curves.
Licensing still comes in two flavours
Ephere sells Ornatrix for Cinema 4D under perpetual and rental licensing. The perpetual licence is USD$649.00 per licence on the current official purchase page. It covers the purchased major version, including free updates within that major version, while future major versions are handled through upgrade pricing.
Rental licensing is currently listed at USD$50 per licence for one month, USD$240 every six months, equivalent to USD$40 per licence per month, or USD$420 every year, equivalent to USD$35 per licence per month. Active rental licences include new minor and major versions released during the rental period. Ephere also states that render-only network nodes do not require Ornatrix licences. Workstations require licensing, but the plug-in may be installed on an unlimited number of network render computers when they are used only for rendering.
https://ephere.com/plugins/maxon/c4d/ornatrix/docs/4/Whats_New_in_V4.html ephere.com
| Product | Ornatrix for Cinema 4D |
| Developer | Ephere |
| Version | 4 |
| Host compatibility | Cinema 4D R25.010 through Cinema 4D 2026; Ephere officially supports the latest revision of each major version |
| Operating systems | Windows 10 or newer; macOS 13 Ventura or newer |
| Mac architecture | Native Apple Silicon build |
| Recommended memory | At least 32 GB RAM for optimal performance |
| Native renderer support | Arnold, Redshift, Corona |
| Interchange | Alembic import and export; Unreal groom export can include groom_color |
| Licence models | Perpetual or rental |
| Render nodes | No licence required for render-only network nodes |
| Demo | Registered-user demo; groom data cannot be saved |
| Evaluation licence | Full functionality; duration set case by case, usually up to two months |
| Pricing | USD$649.00 perpetual; USD$50 one month; USD$240 every six months; USD$420 every year |
