Cinesite’s Zombies for World War Z

We’ve been lucky enough to have Cinesite’s World War Z team as one of Yeti’s early adopters. Holger Voss, Cinesite’s Head of CG Technology, was kind enough to share a few thoughts on integrating Yeti along with their in-house toolset to solve the team’s long-haired Zombie needs during the course of production.

PL: Why did you make the decision to use Yeti over other fur/hair tools?
HV: For our digi double work on World War Z we looked into various hair tools which would allow us to use any dynamics solver. Yeti proved to have the most flexible workflow for grooming and adding dynamics. Its tree based node graph allowed us to achieve what we were looking for in a very flexible and reusable way.

PL: How well did Yeti integrate into your pipeline?
HV: Yeti integrated well into our pipeline using the Renderman dso to generate the final hair at render time. There were a few issues to start with, but with great support we quickly managed to iron these out.

PL: Did Yeti solve all of your hair/fur needs?
HV: At this point Yeti is our main tool for human hair with dynamics. We also used it to generate large wheat fields for another recent production.

Thank you to the whole Cinesite crew for their continued support and especially to Holger for sharing his thoughts with us.