Important Looking Pirates knew Yeti was the Right Tool for Westworld
Important Looking Pirates knew Yeti was the right tool to use when tasked with creating various characters for Westworld, an HBO drama set where the near future and the reimagined past meet.
We’re grateful to to ILP’s Executive Producer, Måns Björklund, for speaking with us about how and why they worked with Yeti on this and other projects.
“The work we did for Westworld included a wide range of different assets and effects, from characters to vehicles to set extensions. In total we delivered about 65 shots for 8 different episodes. We used Yeti for three characters in Westworld: young Dr. Ford, the robot boy and a little bit on Dolores.”
“First, we created a digital version of Anthony Hopkins as “Young Dr. Ford”. Yeti was used to create eyebrows, eyelashes, stubble and other facial hair.”
“To create the effect of the robot boy opening his face to show his mechanical skeleton we had to create digital hair to interact with the rest of the animation. We used a guide curve approach to style the hair to match the look of the actor. The guide curves where then simulated with Maya nHair and plugged back into the Yeti graph. Additionally we used it for eyelashes and other facial hair.”
“For the character, Dolores, we used Yeti to create a layer of “peach fuzz” on the parts we had to replace with CG. This included an extension of the neck and her arm.”
“At ILP we don’t want to limit ourselves to a certain tool set; we always try to find the tools that best suit the project. We have been using Yeti on a lot of different projects over the last few years and so it has become one of our go-to tools when working with characters that need fur or hair. We have mainly been using it for characters and creatures but for some projects we have used Yeti as a scattering tool for environments and other assets.”
“Yeti is a great tool and worked well for when creating these assets. We were able to reuse parts of a set up from one character to another which sped up the process when starting on new assets. The procedural workflow makes it quite easy to adjust and tweak a set up at any point in the process.”
Keep up the incredible work, Important Looking Pirates, and thank you for your continued support of Yeti!