Ephere has released Ornatrix V9 for 3ds Max. The grooming plugin expands its toolset for hair, fur, and feather creation with direct painting, interactive braiding, clump control, and viewport acceleration. The developer describes this version as “more advanced, yet also more friendly than ever.”

Painting Directly on Hair

The new Brush Textures system allows textures to be painted directly onto strands. This eliminates dependency on external maps for colour or attributes and is particularly useful for stylised or localised looks.

Guide editing also benefits from UI refinements: tool icons have been updated, channels are easier to select, and a new Show Channels Map function improves feedback when sculpting guides.

Braiding and Clump Control

V9 introduces interactive braiding—artists can now create plaits directly in the viewport rather than constructing them manually.

Clump tools gain refinements: clumps are coloured for identification, manipulator accuracy has improved, and hit-testing now considers strand width. A new UI slider for manipulators gives more direct control over strand grouping.

Modifier Enhancements

Several modifiers see targeted upgrades:

• Generate Guide Data now visualises group data and output channels.
• Mesh from Strands supports procedural textures on strand-based meshes, adds “Cap faces” for closed tubes, and improves strand group meshing.
• Merge now includes overlap-resolving blend modes when combining grooms.
• Surface Comb offers curved sinks, expanded transform control (move, rotate, scale), and orientation based on the middle sink.
• Length gains curved extensions.
• Frizz includes a “Scale Randomness” option.
• Warp Roots now allows procedural density changes.
• Adopt External Guides supports dependency assignment, critical for Unreal Engine workflows.
• Ground Strands separates distribution meshes from character meshes.
• Hair from Guides consolidates root-count settings into one map.

New presets—Feather and Hair Ball—join the groom library. Existing presets have improved icons, better node naming, and corrected strand directions.

Alembic and Interoperability

Alembic support has been reworked. The export dialog now uses Qt instead of Win32 and can write strand rotations. Export of the groom_color attribute enables compatibility with Unreal Engine’s Alembic importer.

Viewport and UI

The viewport now runs hair calculations on the GPU, significantly improving interactivity with complex grooms. Volumetric strand shadows are enabled by default with adjustable parameters.

The user interface has also been modernised: Qt dialogs replace older windows, a “reset to defaults” button has been added to settings, and modify-panel icons have been refreshed.

Pricing and Upgrades

• Users who bought Ornatrix V8 within the last six months receive V9 free of charge.
• A 50 % early-bird discount on perpetual licences applies until 1 October 2025. After that date, the discount drops to 25 %.
• Monthly and yearly rentals are available, with rental licence holders upgraded automatically.
• A perpetual license costs 649 USD per User, 5 or more will set you back 628 USD per license, and a site license (21 or more) is 12495 USD.

For Production Use

Ornatrix V9 introduces genuinely new grooming workflows, but artists should verify compatibility and stability in production contexts. The addition of GPU hair, Alembic extensions, and procedural modifiers may require pipeline adjustments. Testing in-house is recommended before deployment.

The post Ornatrix V9 for 3ds Max: Paint, Plait, Perform first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.