If you are a regular subscriber to our newsletter, then feel free to just jump on in and start enjoying. If you are new to this publication, then get ready for a brief glimpse of what's going on inside & outside the world of Illuminate Labs. Our intention is to give you a taste of what we're doing and thinking, covering everything from weird and wacky sites that our developers frequent to whatever else raises our collective interests. Naturally, we will keep you up to date on the latest product news and happenings in the world of Turtle and Beast and the gaming industry as a whole.
An entire summer has passed since we last hooked up. And while the temptation to extend the vacation a bit is hard to resist, there is no after beach here at Illuminate Labs (although we do have a license to grill!). We, as always, are busy continuing to develop and improve our products. And, also as usual, we have a lot of exciting stuff to brag about in this issue and have packed it to the brim with news and other good stuff. So mix a new daiquiri or whatever other post-summer beverage floats your boat, get your reading gloves on, and get started already!
We hope you enjoy the issue and continue to send us any input you may have for future issues. Happy reading!
As of the beginning of October, the brand new Illuminate Labs US office in San Francisco is open for business, with Lead Engineer David Larsson there to staff the office. David has been with Illuminate Labs since 2004 and has been involved in the development of both Beast and Turtle.
The opening of the US office will bring Illuminate Labs closer to our North American customers and enable us to assist with product integration more directly. This presence will also, naturally, make it easier to visit customers and to be available for meetings with both existing and new customers.
Don't hesitate to contact us or David for more information or to book a meeting.
To see full press release, click here here.
As you know, we are always working to improve our products and the creation of a general API for Beast is a great leap in this direction. The Beast API is an easy-to-use programming interface designed to make it as easy as possible to integrate Beast with any game engine.
“The Beast API makes it significantly easier to integrate global illumination into your game editor. It hides tasks such as scene export, resource caching, and rendering set-up for distribution behind an easy to use programming API,” says Magnus Pettersson, Chief Technology Officer at Illuminate Labs.
To get more information about the Beast API, click here, and/or to test drive the most powerful lighting technology in the industry, please throw in an e-mail to support.
We have developed a new pricing structure for Beast in response to demand from the market for an increased level of differentiated pricing. The complete price list is now available on our website.
“There has been a strong demand for Beast from smaller and midsized projects using a number of game engines. Now with the API in place it makes sense to meet this need with a more differentiated pricing schedule,” says Magnus Wennerholm, CEO of Illuminate Labs.
The Beast pricing schedule currently ranges from 10,000 USD (project budget less than 1 MUSD and single platform) to 90,000 USD for a multi-platform based AAA project.
To get more information on the Beast pricing, please contact sales@illuminatelabs.com or visit our website for the price list.
Still not convinced? Then read more on our website or click here to set up a Beast evaluation account right away.
In April of 2009, Turtle 5.0 was unleashed upon the world. Turtle 5.0's redesigned global illumination algorithms brought substantial productivity boosts along with improved visual quality.
A range of other new features were also included, such as the streamlined user interface, that provides much easier handling of Turtle attributes, and a unified workflow for surface transfers and texture/vertex baking. Performance was specially optimized for global illumination calculations, which together with the new adaptive anti-aliasing scheme allows for superfast previews as well as very high quality images.
Naturally, since a few months have passed since then, there have also been several improvements and bug fixes following the launch of Turtle 5.0.
In addition, we can now announce that Turtle 5.1 is just around the corner! We will present much more on that in the next newsletter. The new version will include many new features such as blending ambient occlusion directly in final gathering, new controls for ambient occlusion, optimized ray tracing, more intelligent calculation of incident lighting, and much more. Naturally, Turtle 5.1 will also be fully compatible with Autodesk Maya 2010.
To check out the press release about Turtle 5.0, click here or to check out what´s new and the technical specifications, click here.
We are thrilled that we continue to get more and more customers and we are even more pleased when we receive flattering feedback and good reviews of our products.
The September issue of CGSociety featured a developer interview with Art Director Ken Feldman and Lead Animator Bruno Velazquez about the God of War III project, for which they choose Turtle to handle their baked lighting needs.
Ken explains the choice of Turtle: "We use Turtle for baked lighting. After testing a number of different global illumination renderers, we chose Turtle because of its feature set, lua scripting, its speed and the wonderful support offered by the Turtle guys. Turtle gives us the ability to separate direct lightmaps, or direct vertex lighting from indirect. We use all of its global illumination features including final gather. We use image based lighting or skylights and we have the ability to bake ambient occlusion to maps or verts. We also use Turtle light probes (spherical harmonics) as one of our solutions for lighting the characters."
Turtle 5.0 has garnered great reviews, among them an outstanding one from Kenny Lammers, Technical Art Director at Microsoft Games Studios in 3D World magazine's August 2009 issue.
“Turtle remains an unrivalled product, and this latest upgrade only increases its power. Version 5.0 is a must-have for the lighting pipeline in any game studio. Whether you are just starting out, or already a seasoned veteran, it provides an unparalleled work flow tool for all your rendering and real-time baking needs.”
If you want to find out more, check out the full article here.
Either way, do make sure to keep your eyes open for the upcoming new and improved Turtle 5.1!
ILLUMINATE LABS AT GDC ALL OVER THE GLOBE
Illuminate Labs has been visiting the GDC events in Cologne and Austin during the past months and has met a lot of interesting people. Recently we also attended GDC China, where Lead Engineer David Larsson repeated the popular session from the Austin gig about "State of the Art Lighting Mapping". We managed to squeeze in a heap of promising meetings and to establish a great deal of new contacts while in China.
Now we are looking forward to even more, upcoming events. MIGS in Montreal is one of the events that we are going to visit, Games Connection in Lyon is another and IGDA in San Francisco is also on our schedule. Keep your eyes peeled on the news section of our website to see what´s coming up next.
We are also really happy to be able to share the material from David's GDC sessions with all of you who could not make it there. And in response to the large number of requests (see, we heard you!) the slides are now available. Click here to get Illuminated.
UPDATED GALLERY
Don´t forget to visit our gallery for the latest images from all the interesting projects that uses Beast or Turtle, we update the gallery continuously. Among the goodies can be found new screens from Alpha Protocol, Dante's Inferno and Dragon Age: Origins.
Go to gallery
NEW TEAM MEMBERS
We would like to take this opportunity to welcome Mikael Lind, Mathias Wahlin, and Christian Borg to our growing family. Mikael and Mathias are software engineers and will be a welcome addition to the development team and Christian will provide a helping hand in marketing and finance. Hopefully these guys can fill up the office now that David is staffing the US office and Jens is off to raise his own little Beast.
The Turtle website features a host of really cool tutorials that will help you get the most from your Turtle experience. In addition to being extremely hot looking, they're also quite useful, explaining in easy terms how to squeeze every last drop from your Turtle. And by the way, Turtle uses the same technology that is found in Beast! Do and learn here.
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