Illuminate Labs logo |
|
| Industry | Video games |
|---|---|
| Successor | Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) has acquired Illuminate Labs on July 21, 2010 for an undisclosed transaction terms. |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Gothenburg, Sweden |
Illuminate Labs is a Swedish software company based in Gothenburg, founded in 2002 and specializing in video games lighting. The company produces two middleware products called Beast and Turtle, based on their proprietary LiquidLight technology.[1] Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) has acquired Illuminate Labs on July 21, 2010 in San Rafael, California for an undisclosed amount.[2]
Illuminate Labs during the third quarter of 2009 also opened an US office in San Francisco.[3]
Contents |
Turtle is a sophisticated rendering and baking plugin for Autodesk Maya used for lighting and content creation in next-gen game development. With Turtle you can easily create global illumination for your game levels and then bake the illumination into texture maps, vertex maps or point clouds. Other features include the baking of occlusion and normal maps from highly detailed models to low polygon models. All baked results can be visualized in Maya's viewport using the GPU.
Beast is a content pipeline tool used for advanced global illumination and dynamic character relighting. Beast gives you advanced global illumination that enhances the look of your game with little effort. Use Beast to precalculate lighting for light maps, shadow maps and point clouds, to bake occlusion or normal maps or to generate light fields for dynamic relighting of characters and objects.
Illuminate Labs products are used by some of largest and most respected game studios in the world, such as Electronic Arts, Blizzard, Sony Computer Entertainment, Square Enix and BioWare.
Illuminate Labs have ready integrations for Beast with Emergent's[4] Gamebryo[5] Lightspeed[6] and Unreal engine, Evolution and several other in-house game engines. For projects with the product Beast ,not using a ready integration, there is an API.[7] The Beast API is a programming interface designed to make it as easy as possible to create a Beast integration with any game engine.
Several game titles has been made using one or both of the two products. (There are more examples on games that have used Beast and Turtle in the Illuminate Labs Gallery on their website.)
WET (A2M)
Mirror's Edge (EA Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment)
Mortal Kombat (Midway)
EVE Online (CCP Games)
CrimeCraft (Vogster Entertainment LLC)
Alpha Protocol (Obsidian Entertainment Inc)
Dragon Age: Origins (BioWare)
God of War III[8] (Sony Computer Entertainment)
Gran Turismo (Polyphony Digital)
The company has many partners and is part of Epic’s Integrated Partners Program, an Emergent Certified Partner and an official Autodesk Conductors partner.
Unity Technologies has announced that the next Unity version 3.0 will feature built-in Beast lightmapping and global illumination off the shelf.[9]
Other partners include 3D Labs, Adobe, Apple, Angstrom, ATI, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Pixologic.