Peregrine Labs Yeti 1.2.12 (Windows/MacOSX/Linux)

Yeti is Peregrine Labs product to produce fur, feathers and generating lots of things based around familiar working concepts of a procedural node graph directly within Autodesk’s Maya. The toolset has been developed as an end to end solution that easily integrates into most pipelines with ease and built with the goal of efficiently transporting and rendering the data generated while maintaining an artist friendly workflow. Yeti aims to be package agnostic and supports various rendering engines including Pixar’s Renderman, 3Delight, Chaos Groups Vray and Solid Angle’s Arnold.

Procedural Workflow

Yeti has been developed for artists and technical directors who want to have full control over their tools with the freedom and flexibility to create, change, animate and render using the procedural graph editor integrated within Maya’s interface.

The editor is used to chain together a series of nodes, each used to apply a specific modification, that procedurally describes the final result of the graph. These modifiers include Comb, Scraggle, Texture, Instance and many more.

Objects, grooms and guides ( nurbs curves ) can be imported into the graph from Maya as sources for the procedural network with all parameters controlled via a powerful expression language embedded into the application.

Grooming and Simulation

Yeti has been built to support the need of ever changing assets within high end visual effects and feature production – unlike traditional fur solutions Yeti grooms are not dependent on surface topology or texture UVs which allows changes can be made to models with only slight aesthetic tweaks needed ( if at all ).

The grooming process takes place within Maya’s 3d viewport using a custom brush interface that allows the artists to populate, sculpt and paint desired values on the surface with interactive feedback; or use Maya’s component editing mode to have complete control over each strand. There is no prerequisite for numbers of strands or the need to have them at vertex positions giving the user complete freedom to add detail where needed.

As character finaling is an important step in any pipeline each groom can have any number of corrective grooms created post simulation to sculpt and tweak a pose to please those demanding art directors.

Pipeline and Rendering

Yeti has been designed to fit easily within most production pipelines – each graph and all of it’s sources can be exported as a Groom file which is completely independent of any mesh, texture or other asset which allows easy asset management and versioning. Once a Groom file has been published it can be imported back onto the character at a later stage or a base groom can be created to be applied to multiple characters in a crowd.

A built in caching system means that managing animated fur and dynamics are a snap. Once a groom has been assigned to a character a cache can be stored and referenced for an interactive preview of the results, or just left hidden for worry free rendering. All rendering is performed via external DSO’s developed to optimize memory usage with the added option of changing cache parameters without spending the time re-baking.

Each cache file uses a highly parallel format that only stores what’s needed to re-generate the fur with Yeti re-evaluating the graph at render time. This means that caches that historically could have eaten up disk quotas in one evening are reduced to 5 to 10 mb per frame or less, limiting resource usage as well as network bandwidth.

Rendering is fully integrated into Maya via Renderman Studio, 3delight Studio Pro for Maya, Chaos Group’s VRay for Maya and Solid Angle’s Maya To Arnold. Any attribute that flows through the graph ( P, id, Cd, etc. ) can be promoted to a shader parameter and geometry sampling provides the option of inheriting attributes from the generating surface ( per-vertex values ).

Other useful pipeline tools include the ability to save out organized PTCs, bake ambient occlusion and command line cache inspection.

System Requirements
Autodesk Maya 2012, 2013 and 2013.5 64bit on OSX 10.6 ( and up ), Linux 64bit and Windows 7 64bit

Home Page - http://peregrinelabs.com/yeti/