File:Illuminate labs logo white.jpg | |
Industry | Video games |
---|---|
Genre | Game middleware developer |
Successor | Autodesk, Autodesk Gameware |
Founded | 2002 |
Headquarters | Gothenburg , Sweden |
Products | Beast, Turtle |
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]
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 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.
Several game titles have been made with Beast and/or Turtle.
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]