Once a final groom and graph has been created it’s likely that you’ll want to distribute the final look as an asset to be used in multiple shots. Yeti provides the concept of a groom file, which bakes the groom and inputs into a single file making it easy to distribute versions of the groom.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Creating a Groom File
To create a groom file select the Export Groom From Selected Yeti Node from the Yeti menu which will bring up a dialog box providing the means of entering a name of a groom.
It’s generally a good idea to apply some form of versioning to the name of the groom to keep track of the changes, for example lets choose furryMonster_v01.grm.
Voila! A published groom.
Referencing a Groom File
Every Yeti node has a I/O palette that is used to assign a cache or GRM file.
Once a groom has been saved it’s straight forward to reference, select the geometry you’d like to apply it to and create a new maya Yeti node ( CRM in the Yeti shelf ).
Open the I/O palette in the Attribute Editor provide the full path name to the file in the Input Cache File Name attribute and set the file mode to Cache. Unless imported the reference will be live, reading it off disk - if the GRM file is updated the groom will be updated in the scene.
It is possible to update the contents of the cache file by toggling on the Override Cache With Inputs option, this will allow you to pass a groom through your pipeline and re-cache with animation if needed.
Importing A Groom
In the I/O palette there is an option to Import Groom, when a node is referencing a Groom off disk it’s going to be re-reading the groom and replacing the contents of the Maya graph. Any changes made to the Graph will be lost unless imported. Importing a Groom also takes the steps of rebuilding the Groom nodes in Maya which gives the user the option of recreating a working scene.
Once a Groom has been imported make sure you set the I/O mode back to None, otherwise the node will still be referencing the data from disk.