Turtle 3 public beta

Illuminate Labs - makers of Turtle software - are proud to announce the public Beta testing of Turtle 3.0.

Gothenburg, Sweden

Illuminate Labs, makers of Turtle, are proud to announce the public Beta testing of Turtle 3. Turtle 3 is a new rendering/baking engine that is completely focused on the needs of next generation console development. Initial tests from leading game developers have resulted in rave reviews.

Love to bake but hate to wait?

By integrating the baking functions into the core of Turtle, we can now treat standard rendering and baking in the same way. Ultimately, this provides a better workflow while baking and the ability to bake with all of Turtle’s render features. Users can, for example, now bake in the viewport, region bake, super sample their bakings, and do a great deal of other things that could previously be done with rendering. These features, combined with Turtle’s speed, mean that you wind up waiting less and creating more.

"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 truly a one of a kind tool for next-gen development.”

Jason Smith, CG Supervisor, Burnout, Electronic Arts

Other new features in Turtle 3 include:

Bake Layers

All objects are assigned to a bake layer in Turtle 3. This means that you can have specific settings for specific parts of your scene. You can also automatically assign texture sizes within a bake layer by specifying minimum and maximum texture resolutions.

Polynomial Texture Mapping

Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) is a new method for increasing the photorealism of texture maps. Turtle 3 can create PTMs from any surface by creating a virtual light rig. Polynomial Texture Maps are easy to use in real time applications such as games and contains information about self shadowing from any angle. PTMs also captures certain sub surface

scattering effects.

LUA Shaders

Turtle 3 introduces support for a LUA shading node. This enables you to write your own procedural texture shaders and customize output shaders.

To read more about Turtle 3 please click here.