The Turtle crosses the Atlantic – discover the world's fastest baker at GDC

News by GamesIndustry International Contributor

Published on March 5, 2007

March 5, 2007

Göteborg Sweden

For immediate release

What lies behind all those magnificent and beautiful video game graphics? Of course gifted artists, but have you ever considered how it's done? Not many of us do. Wellthere is this super-hot Maya plug-in tool called Turtle and here's a chance to see it in action.

Game developing is not an easy task at best but there is help to be had. Well-renowned Turtle is considered to be the best graphics toolset that combines advanced rendering and sophisticated baking on today's market for Next Generation game development. And a client list that includes companies such as Sony, Nintendo, EA, Valve, Square Enix, Bioware, DICE and even well-known aviation company Lockheed Martin speak for itself.

But what is baking? Apart from stuff which is done in a kitchen. It is best described as the process of transferring light information to texture, "prebaking the light". You typically do this in game development to get more complex lighting than the graphic card can produce. Usually you bake only a RGB-texture but you can bake more complex data as well. This data is then used by the graphics card to produce interesting light effects.

Simply put, what Turtle does is to cut that time dramatically.

Coming out of Gothenburg Sweden, Illuminate Labs has stormed onto the scene with the Turtle plug-in for Maya about which 3D World Magazine wrote: "Turtle is a tool that any games development team should seriously consider, and will certainly come to appreciateIn a race, Turtle may well give you the head start you need."

Turtle will be released in version 4 shortly and adds a lot of new asked-for

features such as:

Spherical Harmonics

Directional Occlusion Mapping

Radiosity Normal Mapping

and many more

And as with the previous version, Turtle 4 includes an industrial strength renderer that handles all the tasks expected by all next-gen developers.

And if creating Turtle 4 wasn't enough, Illuminate Labs has also been working on platform independence of the proprietary technology and are now proud to introduce the first fruit of their labour. The result, Beast, is a fully platform-independent baker that utilizes the fbx-file format, making it easy to add extremely complex baking functionality, such as GI/Spherical Harmonics/PTM etc., to your own internal tools. In addition to just being really cool, this will make life a lot easier for any art department.

The turtle team will attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week and are available for interviews and product demonstrations. Please contact Malin or Marcus below to set up a meeting or just drop by to get a peek at the world's fastest turtle. Find us in the Nordic Pavilion, North Hall 5320 during the entire event.

For more information please contact:

Malin Dellgran, marketing and pr Illuminate Labs

malin.dellgran@illuminatelabs.com

+46 734 100 325

Marcus Legler, pr

ml@marcuslegler.com

+46 708 257 876

About Illuminate Labs:

Illuminate Labs develops and markets rendering and baking technology. Turtle is Illuminate Lab's product for Maya® by Autodesk. Turtle is based on the proprietary LiquidLight® technology, which is also available for licensing to third party platforms.

Turtle has been used in production since 2003. Reference clients include Sony, Weta, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Lockheed Martin, and Valve Software. The Company's headquarters are in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Press Contact: malin.dellgran@illuminatelabs.com

Turtle and LiquidLight are trademarks of Illuminate Labs. Maya is a registered trademark of Autodesk Inc. All other products or companies mentioned are trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. All rights reserved.