Yeti
Fur, Feathers & A Procedural Generator Of Many Things
The toolset has been developed as an end to end solution that easily integrates into most pipelines with ease and built with the goal of efficiently transporting and rendering the data generated while maintaining an artist friendly workflow.
Yeti aims to be package agnostic and supports various rendering engines including Pixar’s Renderman, 3Delight, Chaos Groups Vray and Solid Angle’s Arnold. We’re also happy to help our customers integrate Yeti into a propriety environment and/or rendering solution if the need arises.
Procedural Workflow
Yeti has been developed for artists and technical directors who want to have full control over their tools with the freedom and flexibility to create, change, animate and render using the procedural graph editor integrated within Maya’s interface.
Objects, grooms and guides ( nurbs curves ) can be imported into the graph from Maya as sources for the procedural network with all parameters controlled via a powerful expression language embedded into the application.
As parameters change and nodes are added to the graph the Maya viewport updates to help visualize the final effect with full control over viewport density for quicker/more accurate feedback.
Grooming and Simulation
Yeti has been built to support the need of ever changing assets within high end visual effects and feature production – unlike traditional fur solutions Yeti grooms are not dependent on surface topology or texture UVs which means changes can be made to models with only slight aesthetic tweaks needed ( if at all ).
The grooming process takes place within Maya’s 3d viewport using a custom brush interface that allows the artists to populate, sculpt and paint desired values on the surface with interactive feedback; or use Maya’s component editing mode to have complete control over each strand. There is no prerequisite for numbers of strands or the need to have them at vertex positions giving the user complete freedom to add detail where needed.
As character finaling is an important step in any pipeline each groom can have any number of corrective grooms created post simulation to sculpt and tweak a pose to please those demanding art directors.
Once imported into the graph grooms can be assigned to most nodes to control their output with an unlimited amount of mixing and matching.
Dynamics and simulation are groom based for ROI management with full control over a strands dynamic properties, collision groups and external forces via Maya fields.
Pipeline and Rendering
Yeti has been designed to fit easily within a most production pipelines – each graph and all of it’s sources can be exported as a Groom ( grm ) file which is completely independent of any mesh, texture or other asset which allows easy asset management and versioning. Once a Groom file has been published it can be imported back onto the character at a later stage or a base groom can be created to be applied to multiple characters in a crowd.
A built in caching system means that managing animated fur and dynamics are a snap. Once a groom has been assigned to a character a cache can be written and sourced back in for realtime preview of the results or just left hidden for worry free rendering. All rendering is performed via an external DSO’s that’s been developed to optimize memory usage with the added option of changing cache parameters without spending the time re-baking.
Each cache file uses a highly parallel format that only stores what’s needed to regenerate the fur with Yeti re-generating the fibres at render time. This means that caches that historically could have eaten up disk quotas in one evening are reduced to 5 to 10 mb per frame or less, limiting resource usage as well as network bandwidth.
Rendering is fully integrated into Maya via Renderman Studio, 3delight Studio Pro for Maya, Chaos Group’s VRay for Maya and Solid Angle’s Maya To Arnold. Any attribute that flows through the graph ( P, id, Cd, etc. ) can be promoted to a shader parameter and geometry sampling provides the option of inheriting attributes from the generating surface ( per-vertex values ).
Other useful pipeline tools include the ability to save out organized PTCs, bake ambient occlusion and command line cache tools.
Features
Workflow
- changing UVs and topology handled gracefully
- non destructive procedural workflow
- embedded expression language, SeExpr
- fully integrated into Maya
- support for corrective grooming post-dynamics
- separate display and render attributes
- visual graph editor for node networks
- unlimited number of surfaces, grooms and guide curves
- integrated caching
- groom based referencing system to easily publish and inherit groom styles
- publishable groom files that store a whole groom in a single file for easy versioning and asset management
Grooming
- non topology specific
- strands can be placed anywhere on a surface at any density
- unlimited number of user attributes can be created and painting
- export/import any attribute to/from a 2d texture
- comb and sculpting modes
- mirroring
- full control over brush shape and response
- use maya component mode to pick and shape strands
Graph
- fully procedural
- expression based node parameters
- any number of data streams that can be merged
- multi-leveled clumping
- instance geometry to points and fur
- comb and deform fur based on grooms and guide curves
- create and modify attributes
- group points and fur based on bounding geometry
Rendering and Dynamics
- rendertime evaluation via DSO
- rendering attributes ( density etc. ) can be changed without re-caching
- command line PTC generator for point based occlusion and GI
- ability to pass custom surface attributes to shader for render time effects
- groom based high quality dynamics solver
- support for Maya fields
- any number of input collision meshes
Supported Renderers
System Requirements
Maya 2012 64bit on OSX 10.6 ( and up ), Linux 64bit and Windows 7 64bit.
One of the follow rendering engines for rendering Yeti data:
- Pixar’s Photorealistic Renderman
- Pixar’s Renderman Studio & Renderman For Maya Pro
- 3Delight Studio Pro for Maya
- Chaos Group VRay for Maya and VRay Standalone ( v2.2 and later )
- Solid Angle’s Arnold ( v4.0.2.0 and above ) and Maya to Arnold ( v0.15 and later )
Pricing
Yeti Studio License ( 1 floating + unlimited render licenses ) CA$1195
All licenses include the use of our support forum + ticketing system and minor updates. If your production requires a higher level support please contact us for options.
Try
If you would like a 30 day trial license of Yeti please email licenses@peregrinelabs.com with your full name, contact email address, mailing address and a host id for the license server.
Buy
Please email sales@peregrinelabs.com for any purchase requests. The email should contain a contact name and email address, billing address, number of licenses and a host id for the license server or node locked machine.
Download
Latest Version: 1.1.0
Links to the latest Yeti binaries will be sent along with any trial license requests, if you are a a current Yeti customer please contact the Peregrine Labs team for access.
