TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Yeti Node is the main container for a single Yeti Graph within Maya, you will use this to edit the Graph, assign input Objects, Grooms and Guides as well as set display and rendering parameters.
Display
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Display Output | Used to toggle the display of the graph evaluation. This avoids the need to hide the Yeti node and thus it will still render correctly. |
| Draw Feedback | A few nodes ( Group, etc. ) draw feedback into the viewport as you work with them, this provides a means of turning this feedback on and off. |
| Subd Display | Toggle Yeti’s Subdivision surface evaluation between Display & Render or just Render time. Please see the Subdivision Surface note below for more details. |
| Feather Display Style | Yeti has the option of drawing evaluated feathers as very fast Proxy representations (which is the control mesh for the feather) or the fully evaluated feather, when displaying a fully evaluated feather both the evaluation and display will be slower depending on how highly detailed the feathers are. |
| Viewport Density | As Yeti defines a procedural graph certain nodes can be evaluated at different densities ( Scatter ), by adjusting this you can preview how the graph will look at the specified density. |
| Viewport Length | A means of increasing the overall length of the fur if scale changes. |
| Viewport Width | Ability to adjust the overall width of the generated fur. |
| Color | Used to control the base color used by our viewport shader. |
Yeti by default uses the different rendering engines settings to decide if a mesh should be treated as a subdivision surface or not. If you would like to force a mesh to evaluate as a Subdivision surface you can use both the Yeti Subdivision and Yeti Subdivision Iterations attributes added to the mesh when connected to a node.
Hair Shader
Parameters that control our viewport shader.
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Melanin | Control the amount of Melanin in the hair, 0 is more white/blond and 1 is darker/black hair. |
| Melanin Redness | Modulate the redness of the Melanin component. |
| Roughness | Adjust the specular roughness of the hair. |
| Specular Intensity | This will give you non-energy preserving control over the specular intensity. (ie. this isn't physically correct but not all of Maya's or third party lights provide the correct specular response in the viewport) |
| IOR | Index of Refraction |
Display Cache
As a Yeti node evaluates it stores the result in a display cache, this is used to provide faster feedback when playing back for animation purposes as well as toggling parameters back and forth to compare results.
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Maximum Size (mb) | This lets you set the maximum amount of memory each node will use when caching graph evaluation results. |
| Current Size (mb) | The current size of the nodes display cache, you can force this to be flushed using the Yeti->Flush Display Cache of Selected/All node(s) |
Add Region of Interest
When used a bounding box will be created that will act like a region of interest for the graph which is used to limit the fur/hair evaluation and output to a specific area of the groom. This can be useful if you need to focus on a specific area and/or speed up evaluation while grooming a larger asset.
Due to the nature of Yeti's graphs there may not be a 1 to 1 correlation between the output of a graph evaluated with the ROI on vs off and we recommend checking the full output before saving or publishing assets.
Render
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Obey Region Of Interest | Renders will obey the Region Of Interest when on. |
| Render Density | This controls how dense the fur will be at render time. |
| Render Width | Override the width of the fur at render time. |
| Render Length | A means of increasing the overall length of the fur at render time. |
| Increase Render Bounds | Increase the bounds defined by Yeti at render time. |
| Center Samples Around Zero | Controls whether motion blur will be defined at the current frame or based around 0 ( which some rendering engines require ) |
| Dynamic Hair Tessellation | Toggle support for V-Ray’s Dynamic Hair Tesselation (hint: you probably want to leave this on) |
| Segment Length (pixels) | Used to control how fine the hair is tesselated by setting a maximum pixel length for generated segments. |
I/O
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Input Mode | Control whether or not the Yeti Node will read in a Cache. |
| Input Cache File Name | The desired cache file to referenced by the node. |
| Override Cache With Inputs | If the Yeti node has input geometry it will be used to override any matching geometry in the read cache file. |
| Output Cache File Name | Used to specify an output name when caching a Yeti node. |
| Frame Range | Frame range used when caching initiated by the Write Cache button as well as the number of samples for each frame. |
| Update Viewport | Toggle whether the viewport will update while iterating through the frames as caching. |
| Generate Preview | Store a pre-baked preview of the fur result into the cache file which will be used to draw the cache vs. the need to evaluate. |
| Write Cache | If not using the command line tools this can be used to write a cache to disk using the specified name and frame range. |
Graph
The graph palette is used to manage the connections between the Maya scene and Yeti’s internal representation of the geometry.
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Open Graph Editor | Will open the graph editor for the current node. |
| User Variables | A list of user specified variables. Yeti can be controls by external maya attributes when names correctly, supporting both float and vector variables. This is done by prefixing a Maya attribute created on the Yeti node with either yetiVariableF_ for a float or yetiVariableV_ for a vector. Once created these can be accessed in the Yeti graph as a global variable, for example: yetiVariableF_myValue can be used in the Yeti graph as $myValue. |
| Add Float/Vector | Add a user float or vector to the graph. |
| Input Objects | A list of input geometry to the graph, use Add/Remove object to control which objects in your Maya scene are accessible to Yeti. |
| Input Grooms | Acts similarly to Input Objects but for Yeti groom nodes. |
| Input Guide Sets | Allows you to reference in object Sets that contain Nurbs Curves, these curves can be used as guides in the Yeti graph. |
Corrective Grooming
Corrective grooming is a way in which pose space grooms can be created, the process is straight forward and any number of corrective grooms may be layered to achieve the desired result. Please refer to the Corrective Grooming documentation for more information.
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Corrective Groom Handling | Toggle the correct grooms on and off. |
| Current Grooms | List the currently available grooms on the selected Yeti node, select the desired groom you'd like to build a corrective groom for. |
| Add Corrective Groom | Will add a new groom node to the current scene which will be applied as a corrective groom. |
Other
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Plugin Version | The version of the currently loaded Yeti plugin. |
| Verbosity | Can be used to change how much information Yeti outputs during evaluation and rendering. |
| Image Search Path | Define a list of paths to use to search for textures. The Image Search Path uses colon delineation on Linux/macOS and semi-colons on Windows, environment variables can be used via the ${ENVVAR} syntax. |
| Trace Filename | A JSON file that Yeti will export during evaluation for profiling and may be useful to send to Peregrine to debug slow running graphs. |