Illuminate Labs: Can you tell us how you got your start in the CG effects business?

JG: After attending the Art Institute of Vancouver-Burnaby in 2001, I worked on a few short independent CG films. After slowly gaining experience I started here at Lightroom in 2004.

IL: What influenced LightRoom’s decision to deploy Turtle, and how does it fit into your production pipeline?

JG: At the time we found Turtle, we were currently using Mental Ray. Due to short turnaround times on our projects, we needed something faster. In Turtle, we found the speed that we needed. We tend to rely solely on the LiquidLight GI setup, as we found it improved our render times.

IL: What features of the rendering system are most important for the work Lightroom is currently involved in?
 
JG: The basics are the most important to us at the moment. The speed and ease of use of Final Gather, GI, & HDRI have helped us out greatly. So is the ability to bake out our surfaces into normal maps, as well as the several different shaders that are provided, such as the Oren Nayar shader.

IL: I know you have been using a lot of non-traditional workflows in your productions; workflows that would be considered more “game development” in nature, perhaps, like baking and surface transfer. What is it that you like with the baking and surface transfer parts of Turtle?

JG: The ease of use of the transfer editor is so beneficial. We like how it holds the information and settings of the low poly and high poly objects in the scene.

IL: Can you tell us about the general rendering needs you faced in your projects and how Turtle helped to address them?

JG: Since our projects are all based of the same theory, we tend to face the same issues on each project. The problem we had before Turtle was with the speed of our test renders and final renders. Our projects tend to range in size, from a lower scene size to very large scenes. With Turtle, the speed of the test and final renders helped us achieve a higher sense of realism in a shorter amount of time. We also found that we didn’t have to play with hundreds of settings to clean up the final gather and GI passes. 


IL: Can you share any particularly difficult or interesting rendering challenges that you had to overcome in your daily work?

JG: Our projects can manage to get into some pretty high poly counts, so we found that using the surface transfer feature to create normal maps for our scenes has helped us out in that regard. Other issues we had to deal with were the creation of good shaders for our scenes in a short time span. The abundance of shaders that Turtle provides us with is very beneficial. The many presets that the Oren Nayar shader has, for instance, makes the task of creating shaders much easier.
 
IL: Do you have any final comments regarding your experience with Turtle?

JG: We realize that Turtle is still a young renderer, and can only see more great things to come from it. We’re glad that we have been involved with Turtle as it evolves. The support we have received is really quite unbelievable.