Trixter integrates Yeti for Wolfblood

For the BBC’s second series of Wolfblood Trixter turned to Yeti for the digitally created stars of the show. Rendering Pipeline Supervisor Barry Kane was kind enough to share why the studio made the move to Yeti and some of the challenges of integrating it with Katana.

“We were looking for a fast high quality solution which could also allow us to move away from large I/O intensive RIB archives as used on the first series of the show.”

“A native RenderMan capability which could be potentially integrated with Katana was an additional requirement. The PRMan DSO supplied with Yeti saved us from a potentially very lengthy development cycle of our own to achieve the same capability.”

“Post grooming in Maya 2012, the Yeti fur caches were exported and made available to the Yeti PRMan DSO via a renderer procedural node within Katana. At render-time the DSO would be loaded by PRMan accepting the fur caches and varying user parameters depending on the visual requirements of each shot.”

“With the help of the Peregrine Labs team, we later expanded this capability with an in-house developed Yeti node in Katana which provided easier user access to the DSO parameters such as width and density as well as a consistent scene graph location type which was crucial to the optimisation of renders with multiple wolves.”

“Rendering was performed with Katana 1.2 and PRMan 17 using a combination of area deep shadows and plausible methods.”

Thank you Barry and the rest of the Trixter team and don’t miss their Wolfblood Series 2 reel.