Ephere Inc., creators of the Ornatrix hair, fur and instancing system for 3ds Max and Maya, have posted a look into the new Animation Cache node. The new node is designed for artists to have realtime playback of hair simulations in scenes.
The Ornatrix does this via an Alembic export, saving the cache out as an .abc file. The animation cache node can then bring in that cache, read it, and play it back in real time. This can save quite a bit of time since simulating hair systems with collisions doesn’t offer a great preview, no matter how fast your machine is.
If you are not familiar with Ornatrix, it is a non destructive and artist friendly hair pipeline tool, that fits Maya like a glove. Ornatrix carries with it a “stack” ideology, making it easy to overly operators to create amazing hair grooms and effects. As a bonus, a licence of Ornatrix includes 100 RebusFarm render points.
