Illuminate Labs adds its lighting baking solutions to UE3

[B3D News]

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.

Read the full news item

 

[Farid]

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Try to spot the big development houses and publishers there.

 

[AlNom]

Interesting... Weta Workshop.

 

[Turok]

Nintendo of America. Megaton?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

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.

 

[AlNom]

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

I wonder though, doesn't Halo 3 use some sort of "global illumination" technique? (pre-baked or something)

 

[assen]

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?

 

[AlNom]

Well, why isn't Bungie on the list then? No need to be terse...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

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...).

 

[_phil_]

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).

 

[big4ared]

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.

 

[Graham]

...

I love smart systems like that (using idle devkits) it's always the little details that make you

Ohh and welcome to B3D