Product: Turtle 3 for Maya Released

Illuminate Labs has launched Turtle 3, a photorealistic renderer that is fully integrated with Maya. Turtle 3 removes the differences between the baking and rendering processes, as these along with surface transfers are all now handled in the Maya Renderview. This means that users can take advantage of the rendering features available in their baking process, such as Super Sampling and Region Rendering. Turtle 3 also features lightweight, programmable shading using LUA. “The fact that you can use all the rendering power and functionality in the baking and combine it with things like PTMs makes Turtle 3 a truly one-of-a-kind tool for next-gen development,” says Jason Smith, CG Supervisor for Electronic Art's Burnout series. Surface transfer and baking are also beginning to make their marks outside the areas of game development and real time industries. As such, many architecture and design firms are making use of Turtle's ability to handle extremely large textures. These companies are often required to use such textures in order to produce the visual results required by their field. Turtle 3 also comes with an industrial strength renderer that handles advanced lighting. In this way, Illuminate Labs' Turtle product has been used on a variety of projects where high-end raytracing was required.