IL: Why did you decide to switch from more established tools to Turtle?

JPM: It was a critical decision. We used Maya's standard render engine for many years, getting nice and decent results without any render nodes. But as everybody knows, things started to change. There were new and advanced ways to render and Maya’s only choice was an expensive plug-in implementation, which a small company like us couldn’t afford. When Mental Ray was integrated into Maya we thought it was our salvation. What a big mistake. MR requires a learning curve and render times that we couldn’t afford!! Then we discovered Turtle in a Zbrush Central Forum. We started to test it right away and were very surprised by the speed and ease with which we could render with global illumination. There was no need to use cheap tricks to get ambient occlusion passes anymore. What a joy!

IL: Tell us about the first project you did with Turtle and why you used Turtle?

JPM: It’s all about speed! The first thing we did with Turtle was a series of 5k illustrations. We needed final gather and good quality bump, which Mental Ray didn’t even deliver in 2k. Then Turtle saved our asses when we rendered 4 commercials with live action and character animation in just 2 days and using only 3 dual render nodes. Any attempt to do that with MR would mean missing our deadline big-time. Since Turtle has arrived at our facility we have more time to develop the design and modeling phase, more time to create more complex characters and facial expressions, and more time to composite with live action.

"Turtle gave us more freedom in every aspect of the production since we bought such a “time saver”.

IL: Can tell us a little bit about how you use Turtle in your day to day work?

JPM: Since Turtle was proven in action it is involved almost everywhere. For us, Turtle is a partner from the initial modeling phase. When we create a polygonal character using box modeling, we activate the render as a subdivision feature to check how the model would look in the final render with GI. Obviously you can do that in MR too, but not 10 times faster.  This way we check very fast how a particular polygonal topology would work at render time, which in the end means cleaner and easier-to-rig meshes. When we model non-organic meshes, we just add the minimum detail required, because occlusion is going to deal with the feel of detail and realism – again, FAST. From there to the final render pass is pure joy since Turtle is as easy as using the Maya standard renderer. For us the learning curve practically never existed.

IL: If you summarize your impressions of Turtle what would they be?

JPM: Reasonable price, fast results, nice quality, ease of use. That’s what Turtle is made of.

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