Turtle 2.0 plug-in renderer for Alias Maya, from Illuminated Labs
by Todd Widup

(images by Mark Soon)

When I first started reading about Turtle a year or so ago, I was intrigued by it. Their claims have been heard before, super fast rendering, GI, Ray Tracing, etc. I was curious as to how fast it really was. Well, I finally got to play around with it recently. The 2.0 edition that Illuminated Labs recently announced is currently available via web orders from the Illuminated Labs web site.

The only bad news, I only got 2 days to play with it before this review was due, so instead of a full in depth review, I am going to just cover some basics for now, and some of the new features, but never fear, a full on review will be done soon enough, probably around the beginning of September.

Ok, let start with the install and licensing. Both are really simple on windows. The licensing requires you to run a separate program and point it to your license file that you were sent by Illuminated Labs. Maya would then see it without a problem, and it currently includes both a 6.0 and a 6.5 version. I hope that they make a 7.0 version available soon as well.

After that, I downloaded their docs and tutorial zip files, and got those all setup on my system. The documentation comes in the form of a 2 meg 107 page PDF. The PDF document does a great job of showing you around the controls of each area, and all the command flags for the mel command.

Now, onto the tutorials that you can download from their site. Each tutorial covers one aspect (and sometimes more than one) of the Turtle rendering engine. Usually they build off things you have done in a previous one. As with the PDF, they do a great job of getting you going quickly.

Some of the improvements have been speed increases, the addition of a layer pass editor, as well as a reworking of how it handles Maya Shaders. With Turtle, you can use of their included shaders (SSS, Oren-Nayar, and an Ambient Occlusion shader) or any of the default Maya Shaders. It internally handles the Maya Shaders for rendering. This allows you to install Turtle, and then just load an old scene and render it with Turtle with minimal work.

For preview renders, you can either use Maya’s IPR and set it to Turtle, or in the Render Globals panel, you can set it to External Renderer, versus Plugin Renderer. With the external render, you can get additional diagnostic information, such as photon distribution, a preview mode, and some additional ways to visualize caustics and other internal data.

(image by Mark Soon)

After reading thru the docs and some of the tutorials, Turtle definitely looks like it can hold its own. While I did get a little time to work with it, I quickly starts to remember what I miss about doing lighting work. It just seems to work like you would expect it to. The speed on the simple tests I was running was really impressive, compare to other renderer's I have used. Even a beauty pass with occlusion was not a problem for it.

With the ability to have Turtle spit out separate layers at render time. On top of all that, Turtle can also bake out vertex color data or save out a new texture image map.

For a system that has only been out for a short while compared to other out there, Turtle is setting the pace in some areas, while keeping up in others. It’s a full feature renderer and is something I really recommend. The integration into Maya is top notch, the external preview render and its diagnostic abilities are great, and the speed and the quality of the images are amazing.

Since I only had a few days with Turtle 2.0, I am going to be following this review up in about a month with a full on review of it, with more samples from users, like the ones here that came from Mark Soon, www.marksoon.com . I want to say thanks to Mark for helping me out with some quick images.