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.
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.
Tagging
b3d ± unreal, engine, illuminate, labs
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