MEDIA   

“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.”

Kenny Lammers, Technical Art Director at Microsoft Games Studios in 3D World magazine’s August 2009 issue. 

“We'll use it in our future projects. I think it will be the new standard for game lighting.”
Johannes Söderqvist, Art Director, EA Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment. 3D World, February 2009 on using Beast with Mirror's Edge.

“Turtle 4.1 remains a unique product in its approach to rendering and baking. No rival products offer its direct, useful functionality. Previous versions were very popular with Maya-based games artists, and this latest revision will no doubt be another notch in the belt for Illuminate Labs.”
Fred Galpern, 3D World, November 2007
(Click here to read the complete review.)

“Turtle is a tool that any games development team should seriously consider, and will certainly come to appreciate.”
Steven Kent, 3D World, September 2006
(Click here to read the complete review.)

“Turtle is up to ten times faster than Mental Ray.”
Jeff Smart, 3D World
 
“For what it does, Turtle renderer is without competition.” 
Xen Wildman, CG Channel
 
“It can help you get jobs out of the door in record time. In a commerical world, that makes it a winner.”
3D World, March 2006

“Whether you are trying to push the envelope or simply trying to cut your render times in half, Turtle more than delivers.”
CG Channel, May 2005

USERS

 “Turtle allowed us to quickly iterate on the lighting of the 150+ levels in Dragon Age: Origins, and get great results.”

Andreas Papathanasis, Senior Programmer – Dragon Age: Origins

 “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.”

Ken Feldman, Art Director at Sony Computer Entertainment, Santa Monica

 "A2M has used Turtle in the past, and we were consistently impressed with the speed as well as the results. When we needed a solution to generate lightmaps in our proprietary level editor, we turned to Beast and haven't looked back. Beast allows us to produce high quality lighting at an incredible rate, which is instrumental in creating the unique visual style that sets WET apart from any other product on the market."

David Lightbown, Senior Artistic Technical Director at A2M Montreal

 “As we started preproduction on Tomb Raider Underworld, 3 years ago, we knew we wanted a naturalistic, organic feel to the game’s lighting. Globally illuminated lightmaps seemed to be the answer but we had some very specific needs for our “hybrid lighting” model. A solution was not forthcoming until we found Turtle. The variety of lightmap types available proved to be exactly what we were looking for and in addition to that, the renderer was fast, I mean really fast. Furthermore, the support we got from Illuminate labs was phenomenal. Before Turtle supported Radiosity Normal Maps, I inquired if they had had any plans to ever research RNM’s. Two days later they sent us a working script which allowed us to render and test RNM’s in our engine. Crystal Dynamics pulled the trigger at that moment and we have enjoyed using Turtle ever since.”  

Patrick Sirk, Environment Art Director, Crystal Dynamics

“In Mirror's Edge we went for a very unique and clean art direction. This look required a system that allowed us to bounce not only light but colours too. The Beast lighting solution we have been working with Illuminate Labs to develop has helped us to achieve these goals and helped bring our vision to life.”
Owen O'Brian, Senior Producer, EA DICE

“Without Turtle much of the work that goes into our realtime assets just wouldn't be apparent or even possible. But thanks to the user friendly and incredibly fast baking technology, we're able to take full advantage of the multi-million polygon detail of our high-resolution meshes within a realtime environment. Turtle has improved the results we're able to achieve immeasurably, and thanks to regular updates and a constant stream of useful new features, we can look forward to things getting even better.”
Lead Character Artist, Free Radical Design

“Our artists evaluated several alternatives for our lighting pipeline, and Turtle was a winner in terms of speed, quality, and ease of use.”
Christer Ericson, Director of Tools and Technology, Sony Computer Entertainment, Santa Monica

“Turtle has proven by far to be the best option in our pipeline and I'm really happy that we're using it now. I'm also really pleased with the clear and concise responses we've received from Illuminate Labs' tech support.”
Damon Iannuzzelli, Lead Character Artist, Insomniac Games

“We are using Turtle throughout our whole Killzone asset pipeline; vehicles, characters, environments, lighting, it all gets a Turtle treatment somewhere along the line. The baking and surface transfer features are second to none, and enable us to bake out everything from normal maps to lightmaps to LOD maps with great ease, and an artist friendly workflow. During production there are always things that we have high on our wish list, and Illuminate Labs always responds to those wishes with great features! The new Pre-Tessellation displacement for instance! This enables us to render characters with even more detail in occlusion passes and saves a lot of setup time and tweaking for the artists. Another feature that we make extensively use of is the new Light Intensity features which enables independent setting of direct, indirect, reflected and refracted light, and the custom decay curve control enables us to control light on a very high level and have full control over the look we want to create. Speed is another point that is important, especially when you are working with huge assets and huge expectations, you want to have the right tool for the right job, and Turtle delivers on every level of performance that we need it to. It just works! All this, coupled with awesome support makes this product invaluable in our pipeline.”
Roderick van der Steen, Specialist Artist, Guerrilla Games

“Illuminate Labs already was on the leading edge with Turtle but the new iteration of the engine brings the evolution even further. Loaded with an impressive list of new features that will definitely make any artist who's ever been confronted to the difficult task of generating high quality normal maps a happy artist. The number of attributes that can now be sampled and baked is impressive, including some that no other packages offer (polynomial texture maps, Lua shaders...). The list is long. The whole workflow has also been entirely overhauled with the addition of bake layers, region rendering and a more homogeneous exposure of the extraction interface now relocated with the standard rendering path. Turtle is a precious tool in our creative pipeline and we possibly couldn't expect it to become so much better. With version 3, it definitely has become the ultimate weapon for all our next generation game art asset creation needs.”
Hugues Giboire, Art Director, Ninja Theory Ltd.

“We have used Turtle for quite some time now,and with its next generation render and baking solution for Maya it more then meets 
our requirements for creating next generation games.”
Paulus Bannink, Senior Technical Artist, Guerrilla Games, Amsterdam

“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

“We use Turtle, because it's easy to use, gets the job done quickly and comes with worldclass support.”
Andrew Honacker, CG Supervisor, Engine Room

“I am thrilled to have our team using Turtle in our pipeline, it is evolving in a very intelligent way with the artist’s concerns at heart, and we will be putting Turtle 3 to use as soon as possible.”
Michael Talarico, CG Supervisor, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Electronic Arts, United Kingdom

“Turtle's speed and ease of use makes it a natural first choice.”
 Simon Kirk, Technical Artist, Eurocom, United Kingdom 

“We will definitely use Turtle 3 in our next production. It is superb stuff - well thought out, designed and implemented.”
Wayne Stables, Senior Modeler, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Electronic Arts, United Kingdom

“Turtle gave us more freedom in every aspect of the production since we bought such as time saver.”
Juan-Paolo Mardonez, Lead Artist/Director, Leyenda Films, Chile

“Finally! A fast and high-quality Global Illumination tool integrated into the Maya interface. Our studio is extremely excited with the prospect of applying Turtle lighting results to our current and future Playstation software titles.”
Francois Gilbert, Lead Artist, Sony Computer Entertainment America

“Turtle is a great tool for lighting video game environments. It is easy to set up and allows us greater flexibility with design and more time for visual experimentation. Burning in the lighting to the vertices with Turtle requires little to no manual manipulation afterwards. The results of Turtle can produce beautiful ambient lighting that is too difficult to produce with other methods.”
Trevor Johnson, Lead Artist, Nintendo America
 
“I'm primarily an animator and Illuminate Labs' Turtle rendering plug-in for Maya has brought solid, professional lighting and shading capabilities to my scenes. What a breakthrough! It is extremely fast, easy to use, and stable in production, has great support and provides clear instructions. My favorite plug-in of 2004 just got even bette.”
Peter Allen, Lecturer Media Arts and Technology, University of California Santa Barbara, United States
 
“I'm amazed by how easily Turtle handles very large and complex scenes. The superior speed compared to other solutions really shows when you use raytraced soft shadows and their super fast LiquidLight technology. Working with Illuminate Labs during the last year, they have repeatedly shown that they are ready to listen and work with their customers to solve any problem. In my opinion, Turtle is set for a brilliant future!”
 Jonathan Brosseau, CTO, Alpha Vision, Canada
 
“The reason we decided to go with Turtle was its fast and easy to use ability to bake normal and occlusion maps. Right now I feel that Turtle has the fastest and most accurate ambient occlusion solution on the market.”
Peter Ohlmann, Lead Programmer, Joymania Development, Germany
 
“I sleep better at night knowing Turtle is on the job instead of that other Maya rendering plug-in. No more coming in the morning to half-done jobs gone wrong. There're no tears with Turtle. No yelling. No hate. I went from yelling 'that's not even close' to 'that's about right' without even reading the directions. Turtle turns that GI and FG guilty conscience into guilty pleasure. Turtle means never having to say I'm sorry for missing deadlines.”
Mike Walker, Lead Technical Artist, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, United States
 
“After a long time of production rush, had time to do some serious tests with Turtle, and I can honestly say that I’m amazed! So please be patient to read this long message till its end...

I used this airplane for a job for Mexicana and used Mental Ray for production. It was modeled, textured and rigged here in Vetor Zero. The average render time for frame in video resolution was 1:30 hs in my dual Xeon 3.6 Ghz. Then I tried Turtle. I could achieve a lighting setup very close to the MR setting very fast. Matter of fact, I though that Turtle lighting was even better looking. I was impressed with the transparency of operation and the excellent integration with Maya. Well, the same frame rendered in 13 minutes!!!!! Still suspicious, I rendered a short animation to check for flickering and other artifacts. Surprise! There were none at all! Should I have used turtle in my job, I could have kept our render farm free for other jobs and render it all in my desktop! I can tell that Turtle managed even better fine details and textures that were flickering in MR render. I did some tests with displacement and normal mapping as well and I’m again stunned with the speed and quality of Turtle. I believe that you guys are many steps ahead in the process of integrate Turtle and Maya than the competition.”
Alceu Baptistão, Partner/Director, Vetor Zero, Brazil