Realistic Conan was created with Yeti by Black Studios

Earlier this year, Bläck Studios was tasked with executing a cinematic trailer for Conan Exiles, Funcom’s new multiplayer online game to be released this summer. The realistic Conan was created with Yeti and the results are stunning.

We recently caught up with Henrik Eklundh, VFX Supervisor at Bläck to talk about how and why they used our software for this project.

“The trailer features Conan and he had to look iconic and cinematic. So to reach that level we needed the hair, brows, lashes, beard and ‘peach fuzz’ to look stunning. Our brilliant character artist, Jonas Skoog, took a turn in zbrush with fibremesh to place out the hair which I took and refined using Yeti tools. We converted the hair back and forth from guide curves to grooms to get the look we needed.”

Eklundh went on to tell us, “We are very comfortable using Yeti and have a great pipeline written by Erik Johansson for it. We can go back and forth with guide curves/grooms and simulate the hair in either Yeti’s simulation tools or other programs. We trust Yeti to give us what we need in terms of hair and fur, therefore, it was the obvious choice.”

When we asked Eklundh if Yeti was able to achieve the desired results and accommodate the project’s needs, he responded that, “The results were great and it’s easy to get clumping on clumps using procedural setups in the Yeti graph. We can take setups from different characters and apply them to get a good start. The new viewport rendering of the hair helped out a lot. It’s much easier now to see the result you are getting with the width of the hair, clumping and density etc.”.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Henrik, and congratulations to the entire team – the trailer is terrific!  Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEIcftl0OZk