Peregrine Labs ships Yeti 5.0
A still from The Amazing Maurice: one of the recent productions on which Yeti was used.
Peregrine Labs has released Yeti 5.0, the latest version of its fur and feathers plugin for Maya.
The update introduces a new hair shader for Maya’s Viewport 2.0, reflecting current hair shading workflows, and makes it possible to import XGen Interactive Grooms into the Yeti node graph.
A staple of many modern VFX and feature animation pipelines
First released in 2011, Yeti is a node-based tool for creating, grooming and styling hair, fur and feathers, supporting a non-destructive, topology-independent, layer-based workflow.
It is compatible with the Arnold, Redshift, RenderMan, Unreal Engine and V-Ray renderers.
Yeti has been used in production on a range of VFX and animation projects, with recent credits including animated feature The Amazing Maurice and The Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.
New in Yeti 5.0: new Viewport 2.0 shader and updates to the node graph
Key changes in Yeti 5.0 include a new hair shader for Maya’s Viewport 2.0.
According to Peregrine Labs, it “aims to match commonly used production hair shading techniques” and features controls for melanin and IOR.
It is also now possible to import Maya’s XGen Interactive Grooms into the Yeti graph, and all of Yeti’s Maya nodes now support soft selection and weighted transforms.
Under the hood, the Yeti graph gets a new Groom Sampler, enabling any parameter to be controlled by a groom’s paintable attribute more directly.
The software is now available for Windows and Linux only, macOS support having been discontinued with Yeti 4.2.
Pricing and availability
Yeti 5.0 is available for Maya 2023+, running on Windows 10+, RHEL, CentOS and Rocky Linux 8.5.
Indie licenses – one perpetual node-locked workstation licence and one render licence – are available to artists with revenue under $100,000/year, and cost $329.
Studio licenses – one perpetual floating workstation licence, plus five render licences – cost $699. Further packs of five render licences cost $399.
Read more about Yeti 5.0 on Peregrine Labs’ website
Read a full list of new features in Yeti 5.0 in the online release notes
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