Illuminate Labs adds its lighting baking solutions to UE3

Wednesday 19th December 2007, 12:12:00 AM, written by Farid

The ever popular game engine from Epic, Unreal Engine 3, has added another not-so-shabby middleware solution to its already well featured arsenal. That new middleware is none other than Illuminate Labs’ lighting baking solutions.

Sunday, Illuminate Labs announced that it joined Epic's Integrated Partners Program (IPP). Concretely, this means any UE3 licensee can easily add Illuminate Labs products to their tool pipeline, without requiring any extra efforts from the under appreciated team’s tool programmers.

Illuminate Labs’ products, known as Turtle and Beast, are offline rendering and baking solutions. In other words, they render a model or a scene and then store the complex lighting information in classic color/ambient/ light/normal maps. They can also calculate the spherical harmonics values required with dynamic precomputed radiance transfer (PRT).

The Illuminate Labs products are much appreciated in the field, with companies such as Polyphony Digital (makers of Gran Turismo), Bioware (Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars KotOR, Mass Effect), Square Enix (Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts), to name a few, all customers and users of Turtle and Beast. Even offline CGI houses like Weta and Engine Room Visual Effects use these tools. In the case of offline rendering, baking permits the overall reduction of rendering time of a scene by not calculating occlusion and radiance transfers on a surface for every frame.
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Tagging

b3d ± unreal, engine, illuminate, labs


Latest Thread Comments (11 total)
Posted by AlStrong on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 00:37:44 UTC
Interesting... Weta Workshop.

Posted by Turok on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 00:40:58 UTC
Nintendo of America. Megaton?

Posted by Laa-Yosh on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 01:34:21 UTC
As for Illuminate lab's Turtle renderer, it's quite a b****. We've received Maya assets from one client that had all kinds of nodes left in it, and with the absence of the renderer plugin it was nearly impossible to clean the scene files.

Weta is probably using it for the PJ Halo games. I've heard they're the developers, not Bungie.

Posted by AlStrong on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 01:48:35 UTC
Quoting Laa-Yosh
Weta is probably using it for the PJ Halo games. I've heard they're the developers, not Bungie.
:yes:I wonder though, doesn't Halo 3 use some sort of "global illumination" technique? (pre-baked or something)

Posted by assen on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 17:13:43 UTC
Quoting AlStrong
:yes:

I wonder though, doesn't Halo 3 use some sort of "global illumination" technique? (pre-baked or something)
Ummm, yes, and this is exactly what Turtle/Beast provides. Your point?

Posted by AlStrong on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 17:29:44 UTC
Well, why isn't Bungie on the list then? No need to be terse...

Posted by Laa-Yosh on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 18:20:58 UTC
There are like, dozens of existing rendering engines that can provide a global illumination solution. Although most developers like to use their own, in-house, optimized version.

I'd also like to add that many customers use the Turtle renderer to create normal maps using raytracing. So did our client as far as I know, our guys actually had to UV and texture some very high res source models (yes it isn't really the most effective method possible...).

Posted by _phil_ on Wednesday, 19-Dec-07 18:59:07 UTC
Turtle brings a lot for game developpement.It's a wonderfull "bake machine" the most complete solution out there ,with even Radiosity Normalmap ,PTM and lua programable custom baking.Plus it's a fast renderer (for AO for example) and a usable "render to another UV set" feature (broken in maya).

Posted by big4ared on Friday, 21-Dec-07 04:44:39 UTC
Anything is really better than what Unreal has now, where you have to place all your lights manually, and then add more lights to simulate bounce. The engine doesn't do any GI or AO.

According to the article, it says that they "will" integrate it, implying that it isn't integrated yet. Right now, with UE3, you press a button to bake, wait for 2 hours, and then your bake is done. I'm curious how that will work with GI, since GI renders could easily take much longer. Will it be the same process, or will you have to integrate it with something like Qube?

Custom radiosity schemes can actually get pretty cool. There was one that would find idle Xenon dev kits at night and run the raytracer on them. Every unused dev kit in a large game studio...that's a lot of rendering power.

Posted by Graham on Saturday, 29-Dec-07 13:39:02 UTC
Quoting big4ared
...
I love smart systems like that (using idle devkits) it's always the little details that make you :mrgreen:

Ohh and *welcome to B3D :yes:*


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