Yeti helps Cinesite recreate Sparta

Cinesite created over 350 visual effects shots on 300: Rise of an Empire, completing work in just a few short weeks. Many of their shots involved the creation of Ancient Greece, and Yeti was used to create a key aspect of one of their main sequences.

Cinesite’s Visual Effects Supervisor Richard Clarke: “Sparta is a place where the wind defines the ambience of the environment and the movement of wind over the wheat field was a great way of representing this. In this shot, I wanted to create huge, open, natural wheat fields wafting in the wind.”

Yeti’s instancing was improved due to feedback from Cinesite; including full support for PRMan’s ObjectInstance (and similar for the other rendering engines) which was used heavily on the production.

“The obvious choice for us was to use a fur system to give us ultimate control over the look and dynamics of the wheat. Yeti is our primary in-house fur system; we were able to get our own custom version from Peregrine Labs that allowed efficient geometry instancing for the ears of wheat. Yeti enabled us to achieve what we wanted technically, and creatively-speaking the finished result is lovely. These shots are some of the ones I am most proud of on this project.”

We were able to achieve all of our goals and we were very happy with the workflow and throughput of the Yeti toolset. The artists found it intuitive to use and feedback from Peregrine Labs was always quickly received; they were very responsive to our needs.