Groom Files

After creating a final groom and graph, you'll likely want to distribute the finished look as an asset for use across multiple shots.

Yeti offers groom files—a feature that bakes both the groom and its inputs into a single file—making it simple to distribute different versions of the groom.

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 versioning to the groom's name to track changes—for example, "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

The I/O palette includes an Import Groom option. When a node references a Groom from disk, it continuously re-reads the groom and replaces the Maya graph contents. Without importing, any changes made to the Graph will be lost. Importing a Groom rebuilds the Groom nodes in Maya, allowing users to recreate their 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.