We are happy to announce the release of Yeti 5.0, a new major update focused on artist quality of life and workflow optimizations, here are some of the highlights.

Viewport Updates

5.0 introduces a new Viewport 2.0 shader for Maya which aims to match commonly used production hair shading techniques and adds new shader controls for Melanin, IOR and other properties. 

In addition, the groom node has had a UI overhaul, providing clearer feedback and ability to customize size and transparency of the strands. 

Maya Integration

It is now possible to import Maya's XGen Interactive Grooms into the Yeti graph expanding the potential workflows and use cases, whether using XGen to initiate a new groom or using Yeti to render XGen grooms with additional details the possibilities are endless. 

All of Yeti's Maya nodes now support soft selection and weighted transforms with context-based marking menus for more efficient editing.

Graph and Nodes

The graph evaluation framework has undergone various optimizations to improve both execution time and memory usage and a new Groom Sampler has been added which allows any nodes parameter to be controlled by a Groom's paintable attribute (and length) more directly.

Unlike previous major releases where a lot of needed work led to breaking changes, we wanted to ensure that any assets currently using recent 4.x releases could be ported and used with little to no housekeeping.  Thank you to all our beta testers who provided feedback to ensure we can provide a smooth transition.

Yeti 5.0 is currently available for Maya 2023 and 2024 on Windows and Linux. 

For details on additional changes please refer to the full release notes.

Upgrading

If a Yeti 4.0 license was purchased on or after November 1st 2023 it is eligible for a complimentary license upgrade to 5.0, please submit a request via this webpage and our license team will issue your new license as soon as possible.

For all other upgrade options please refer to the Yeti product page. 

Thank you and happy grooming!