Illuminate Labs announced the fifth generation of our renderer plug-in Turtle for Maya, now available as a public Beta, faster, sharper, and shinier than ever.

Much work has been done to improve the Global Illumination system. We have a completely new Final Gather algorithm, which is better at handling discontinuities in both lighting and geometry. The handling of light leak problems has also been improved, for both Final Gather and the Path Tracer. New controls for adjusting color balance and attenuation of indirect lighting have been added. Performance is much improved (especially in multi-bounce FG), as well as scaling on multiple CPUs.


The baking system has also received a whole lot of love. We now have a unified workflow for Texture/Vertex Baking and Surface Transfer enabling you to combine baking from high res surfaces with ordinary baking and everything can now be done at both the texture and vertex level. A new adaptive sampling scheme has been implemented for anti-aliasing, as well as a specific system for handling very small or thin triangles in texture bakings. For vertex baking there is also a new sampling method which gives smoother and better results.

In addition, the system for handling Turtle specific attributes and settings has been redesigned. It's now less noticeable and more memory efficient. The user interface has also been improved to make it easier to find the specific controls that you need to adjust.

Support for Maya 2009 is, of course, included in the package.

These are just the highlights of all new features and improvements in Turtle 5.0

More Information at www.illuminatelabs.com. Image and Video Courtesy of QSST and Illuminate Labs