Wild Hunting with Platige Image
Late last year Platige Image executed the new trailer for the third game in The Witcher series – “THE WITCHER 3: Wild Hunt“. We had the pleasure of speaking with the team about Yeti’s involvement in the production.
Peregrine Labs: Why did you make the decision to use Yeti over other fur/hair tools?
Staszek Marek: Yeti worked perfectly for the Tiger series of commercials we previously used it on, so after additional testing we decided to use it on The Witcher 3. Looking back at the production I must say that the cache system in Yeti was extremely useful.
PL: Which features of Yeti did you rely upon the most?
SM: The procedural workflow is a really great aspect of Yeti – this is what distinguished Yeti from other plugins that we used previously.
Maciej Benczarski: I can’t stress enough how using Maya’s curves as the hair guides together with very smooth hair interpolation between guides algorithm saved us tons of time.
SM: Yeti used memory extremely efficiently when when rendering hair with GI. We needed a big volume of hair consisting of large amounts of elements – with Yeti we were able to render characters with hair, sss and displacement maps together within very reasonable times.
PL: Did Yeti solve all of your hair/fur needs?
MB: Yeti indeed solved many challenges we have faced with other hair tools, especially pipeline and resource based. Nevertheless, photorealistic hair look and movement is not a trivial task (especially for long hair) and there’s still a lot of work ahead of us.
PL: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us about your experience with Yeti?
SM: The huge advantage was that Yeti was very stable in the project. I can’t recall any crashes in preparing the hair, which is so often in case of other software.
MB: The Visual Effects industry is very challenging these days and we’re aiming higher with every new project we face. With that said – there’s still plenty of work ahead of us and our expectations for the tools and products we use grow every day. Nevertheless, up to now, the cooperation between Peregrine Labs has shed a light of hope on the subject of our hair pipeline and we feel we’re heading the same way in achieving our goals. I’d like to personally thank Colin and the Yeti Central community for super-fast responses, help in debugging and very useful feature additions which are extremely rare these days. Once again, thank you.
