Illuminate Labs caught up with Andrew Honacker, CG Supervisor, at Engine Room  to talk about how they’re using Turtle in their current Lionsgate production.

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

AH: We were at the point of making a decision to continue our upgrade path with Mental Ray Standalone licenses for another year. I had had long standing frustrations with Mental Ray by this time and decided to explore some other options before resigning ourselves to it again as our primary render engine. Although MR is a robust and high quality renderer, its integration with Maya and the support for its use was and continues to be less than desirable. Small boutique vfx companies cannot afford the luxury of R&D departments or teams of TD’s specializing in render technology. Render systems like Mental Ray and Renderman are robust to the point of becoming nearly unusable without a crew whose soul purpose is to write specialty shaders, problem solve render issues and tune settings on a daily basis. We needed a more viable solution. One that would give us the quality we needed out of the box without having to waste days of tuning and problem solving. One that had a tech support team directly available to us with a simple phone call or email. One that had our best interests in mind and could rise to the challenges that a visual effects company faces on a daily basis. Because Illuminate Labs is a relatively fresh face they were able to give us that level of attention that more senior render software companies cannot. They were able to come in and act as our R&D department for a number of projects streamlining their toolsets for production and even developing functionality on the fly. The relationship was instantly mutually beneficial. The more we challenged them to improve an already incredible product, the better our work became and the more Turtle continues to become a production proven render engine.

IL: Can you share any particularly difficult or interesting rendering challenges that Engine Room had to overcome on the "Lionsgate" sequences?

AH: Well the most obvious challenge was to create hyper-realistic looking high polished metal with anisotropic qualities and glossy reflections. Metal that wasn’t speeding by you. Objects that were close to camera and moving slow enough to not give us the luxury for any of the usual CG “cheats.” Beyond that, this project presented us with the opportunity to create a piece that would potentially be seen on every Lionsgate release for the next 20 or 30 years so we wanted to push the envelope on the level of quality and
detail. This inspired myself, my lead TD, Giancarlo Lari, and lead lighting artist, Mike Kirylo, to do the what at the time seemed unthinkable – or at least overkill for a project like this: create, render and composite everything in a 32bit pipeline all the way up to final filmout. 32bit work is slowly beginning to become more so of a standard practice at high-end facilities but for small shops it’s certainly not that viable. Knowing that Turtle had already implemented 32bit rendering output at surprising speeds to both Tiff32 and ILM’s OpenEXR format gave us the confidence to explore this workflow.

We began by testing real world lighting setups on our stage with a number of gears and a variety of other metals. We then photographed and generated HDR images to begin as our baseline within the 3D environment.

The next obstacle to tackle was the quality of the metal: high polish and brushed metals with anisotropic and glossy reflections – a nightmare for any raytracing render engine! After the first render tests we realized that reflections had a greater contribution to the look of the metal gear than the ambient or direct light. After some thought we decided to rely on raytraced reflections to make the gears look realistic, but that approach required us to have at least 3 to 4 bounced and blurred anisotropic reflections for every gear, a crazy idea for a final 2k render! The amount of gears and their proximity to each other quickly put us into a corner where we got an unbearable amount of noise without an insane amount of glossy rays or super sampling. But this is what we take for granted when we shoot on film, and we wanted to get close to the look we got with our camera tests. Turtle had just the right real world physics based shader for us, which after a few added features gave us unsurpassed control over optimizing quality vs. performance. Along with Turtle’s incredible baking features, Final Gather precalculation options, quick and simple Ambient Occlusion output and too many other production features to note here, we were able to quickly test, tune and render.

Together with After Effects 7 we developed a full High Dynamic Range pipeline from start to finish. Our final composite and DI retained the range to really tune our final image without crushing brights or losing midrange information.

The speed and quality that Turtle produced these 32bit images was second to none that I have seen to date and even then they continued to help us reduce render times and increase quality throughout the project.

IL: Do you have any final comments regarding your experience with Turtle?

AH:  I have never experienced the kind of customer attention and support that Illuminate Labs provided and continues to provide to us. There’s nothing like making a phone call to tech support for a problem, question or advice, being put on hold and within seconds having the programmer who wrote the actual code in question answer the phone happy to help and talk things through. I remember crunch times when they would call while out at a bar on a weekend just to make sure things were going smoothly for us! You can’t beat that!

I can’t say that I didn’t have to fight my share of doubters and critics when I first made the decision to forego Mental Ray, a industry proven software and “buzz” word, for Turtle, a newcomer in the CG world and one that did not really have much to show at the time. There were a lot of raised eyebrows. Mental Ray is of course well known for its metals if not it’s speed and robustness. People knew Mental Ray. They were used to its quirks and the frustrations of working with it. In fact I found most artists treated it like being in an abusive relationship – they would rather be safe and miserable than try something new! But Turtle stepped up and took the challenge head on. It made believers of our client and my artists in record time. And they did it while saving us money to boot since they sell their seats per machine rather than CPU. I continue to feel like I found a diamond in the rough with Turtle. As word spreads and they continue to grow, the intimacy of their nearly 24 hour customer service may become less and less viable for them but I can see a cultural difference in the company they hope to grow into: a recognition of the needs of their clients in a frantic, fast paced and constantly changing vfx industry to have a partner that is personally available to them and one they can trust to continue to push the limits of quality and speed with their products.

IL: Thank you and good luck. The Lionsgate work looks amazing!

AH: Check back soon for the Horror version of Lionsgate

Click here to go to Engine Room's website.

Click here to go to DevaStudios website

Go to the animation section of the Gallery to see the Lionsgate film.