Freefolk’s furry trio for Smythson

We were extremely happy to hear that the team at Freefolk chose Yeti when tasked with creating a trio of furry photo real animals for an upcoming online film for Smythson.

“Our team have been using Yeti for a few years on a number of creature jobs so we already had a lot of positive experience and felt comfortable with the tools and functionality it provided.” shared Harin Hirani, Freefolk’s Head of 3D, he continued “We felt it was still the best solution for digital fur and we were very happy to use it again on this project.”

“This project required a Tiger, Giraffe and Elephant that would appear in close up shots so they had to be built to the highest detail. I was mainly responsible for the look development of the tiger, which involved modelling, texturing, shading and the grooming of the fur. It was by far the most complex groom we had completed yet with dozens of maps and attributes controlling the look of the fur across the body.”

“Yeti’s node based procedural approach made it really easy to create different styles of fur and layer them up intuitively while remaining easy to adjust if needed. We were able to pass attributes to the renderer to create variations of colour for each strand which gave us more control over its appearance.”

When asked if there was anything else that stood out about the team’s experience with Yeti, Harin replied “Initially we were nervous about having to create enough hairs to cover the surface area of a giraffe as the fur is so short. But Yeti proved to be very reliable and had no problems generating the 22 million strands that was needed.”