Fluffy Avocado
Chapter one: The Great Ornatrix Rant
Been dreaming of harnessing the power of Ornatrix for quite some time.
All those nice fluffy cute chonkers it can help me achieve in a simple...
... train of mindboggling mishaps that would make you hate the guts out of this tool!
You know, some people compare 3Ds Max learning curve to an attempt at crossing a minefield. And sure it is - you have to leave some perfectly good legs out there to get how to crawl without blowing yourself up.
My personal experience tells me that Vray isn't much better in that regard.
And it all applies to this tool, but doubled, tripled and quadrupled! Ornatrix just never runs out of reasons why your scene absolutely wouldn't work - from strictly one live hair modifier per mesh to baked instances of those modifiers that can in fact be attached to a single mesh in multitude...
Just to get all broken and tangled up after you save the scene and load it the next day.
Yes, every time.
All of this and many more little oddities that can be sorded out and swerved only through practical embarassment and all sorts of pain get multiplied on the peculiarities of Max and Vray resulting in remarkably brittle scenes:
You may even tweak them - just do that incremental save before literally anything, and... Ok, here we go... And it's gone again! Yesss, knew it would happen!
Well, I know, we've wandered off the course just the littlest bit, let's get back on track!
Chapter 2: An act of power
So it passed over two years since I've lost an appointment at a quite a prominent studio after Ornatrix just baldly decided not to render at all under any circumstances - and I thought to myself: Be gone all of your personal crisis, you must harness that son of a gun anyway!
So I've taken a favourite toy quitely sitting by my bed and started virtualizing it rapidly - made a nice soft cozy midpoly, unwrapped it, drew the technical maps for the facial details and groups of hair...
And at that point all of the rapidity instantly slipped out of the project as I've started figuring out surprising new ways by which Ornatrix can deny your best efforts.
At first there was an absolutely gorgeous initial long hair setup that fell a victim of Ornatrixes instability and some mishap with the Max autosave system being prone to self-disarm.
It was resembling the actual real fluffy fruit the most and fortunately a test render of it was left in my VFB history!
After some tweaking it was to be almost a perfect match, but unfortunately I wasn't able to recreate exactly the same thing.
And right at the same time disaster stroke as I found out the fact that I would have to bake my fluff in order to get both the face and the fluffy butt together.
Chapter 3: Happiness
After some trouble with Ornatrix treating technical textures kinda finicky - the facial hair came together quite nicely and I've baked both of the growth zones and happily planted them on my beautiful now fluffy and twice as fat avocado, saved the scene and called it a day.
Just to return the next morning to find out that hair transplantation results got all broken.
But what a thrill was to find out you can actually repair them! Just be sure to do that every time you open your scene.
And - to the question of our topic! What is the true happiness, if not seeing this piece of software create such a cute little fluffer despite it's complete lack of will to cooperate!
Just look at it, huh?
Have a good one, take care, come across for some hopefully less spicy narrative.
