Illuminate Labs of Gothenburg, Sweden has announced the release of Turtle 2, a photorealistic rendering engine designed to work with Alias’ Maya software. Available for Maya 6 and newer on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux platforms, Turtle costs US$1,199 for a workstation license and $999 for a renderfarm license.
Improvements to Turtle 2 include performance enhancements. The software uses the second generation of the LiquidLight technology platform. The shading system is implemented in scratch in Turtle rather than using Maya’s API, and new realistic materials and utility nodes have been added. A new Render Pass System provides more control over image compositing, with the ability include reflections, refractions, incandescence, subsurfacing scattering, global illumination and more.
“Baking” improvements have been made, like super-sampling and filtering of baked textures and baking of surface properties from high to low-resolution surfaces. You can batch-bake multiple objects and frames. Surface Transfer allows users to transfer surface properties from high to low-resolution objects, and supports the output of normals, displacement and lighting and shading at new levels of detail.
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