Studio Focus: Universal Production Partners

Universal Production Partners (UPP) is an award-winning visual effects & post-production house based in Prague. Since being founded in 1994 they have grown to be one of the largest and most versatile studios in Europe focused on pushing the boundaries of technology and art with a strong vision for storytelling, directing and CGI.

With a wide range of services provided, UPP’s VFX supervisor and Head of 3D for advertising Mario Dubec shared some thoughts (and beautiful imagery) about how and why they having been using Yeti over the last few years.

“At UPP advertising we have been creating CG animals for years, and since some of them have required realistic fur we’ve had to keep researching and searching for the best suitable tools to create it. In the old days, we have used extensively Shave & Haircut plugin for Maya and in some cases native fur tools in XSI. As new tools were appearing we had our fair share of experience with Maya Xgen and Houdini native fur tools as well. But currently, our grooming artists found Yeti to be most flexible and user friendly yet still partly procedural tool to groom the animals.”

“The main catalyst for using Yeti in our recent and ongoing fur projects was ease of setup, simplicity of nodal approach and flexibility to do constant adjustments which are so important in the look development of creatures until very end of the project. Another advantage is how light the groom setup is on the scene and how well the plugin communicates the data with our most used Arnold renderer.”

“So far we have not reached such a limitation of Yeti which would hold us back or motivate us to look for alternative solution for creating fur. Another advantage is also flexibility to change the underlaying model during the grooming process without necessity to redo the whole setup or go through painful steps of setup transfer. And as our artists work simultaneously more and more with Houdini as well, the nodal & procedural approach allows them to stay in the same mind-set while utilizing Yeti in Maya.”

Don’t miss UPP’s animal reel which is available to watch on their website.