Illuminate Labs

Illuminate Labs
Industry Video games
Genre Game middleware developer
Successor Autodesk, Autodesk Gameware
Founded 2002
Headquarters Gothenburg, Sweden
Products Beast, Turtle
Website www.illuminatelabs.com

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 LiquidLight technology.[1]

Illuminate Labs products are used by some of largest game studios in the world, such as Electronic Arts, Blizzard, Sony Computer Entertainment, Square Enix and BioWare.

Illuminate Labs opened an office in San Francisco in 2009.[2] Autodesk acquired Illuminate Labs on July 21, 2010 in San Rafael, California for an undisclosed amount.[3]

Products

Turtle

Turtle is a rendering and baking plugin for Autodesk Maya used for lighting and content creation in next-gen game development. Turtle can create global illumination for 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

Beast is a content pipeline tool used for advanced global illumination and dynamic character relighting. Beast enables advanced global illumination that enhances the look of video games with little effort. Beast can 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.

Games titles

Several game titles have been made with Beast and/or Turtle.

Partners

The company is part of Epic’s Integrated Partners Program, an Emergent Certified Partner and an official Autodesk Conductors partner. Other partners include 3D Labs, Adobe, Apple, Angstrom, ATI, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Pixologic.

Unity Technologies has announced that the next Unity version 3.0 will feature built-in Beast lightmapping and global illumination off the shelf.[5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Turtle 5.0 : Lighting the next generation of games, MrCAD
  2. ↑ Swedish Lighting Tool Developer Illuminate Labs Expands In U.S, Gamasutra
  3. ↑ Autodesk Acquires Illuminate Labs – Maker of Lighting Technology for Games, Autodesk
  4. ↑ CGSociety - God of War III
  5. ↑ Unity Technologies Unveils Third Generation of Its Powerful Development Platform, Unity3D
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