Autodesk Acquires Illuminate Labs: Key Messages for Spokespersons
Key Message #1: Technological progress is a mainstay of the games industry. Autodesk aims to help game developers be more competitive with technology for a more modern pipeline.
- We want to see our customers, the creative visionaries, spend less time building workflows or solving redundant problems, and more time realizing their vision for the game.
- That’s why we offer game developers a broad set of technologies that can be used for game art creation, animation and runtime environments, designed to help them solve both creative and technical challenges so they can really focus on the game.
- We continue our focus on making game development more efficient for the creative visionaries who use our products:
- Helping save valuable programmer time with advanced middleware technology
- Helping developers to build more highly efficient workflows that can scale with Autodesk® FBX® software interoperability technology
- Equipping artists with great tools for game content creation, so they can preserve their creative vision
- Illuminate Labs’ two products are Beast™ and Turtle game lighting solutions. The key benefit of these products: More realistic lighting in games – better visual quality achieved faster by game developers.
- Beast middleware is popular for the advanced lighting of worlds, characters and objects in a game (global illumination and dynamic character relighting).
- Beast is production proven: Launched in 2008, used in 40+ game titles.
- The benefits of Beast:
- Providing higher-quality interactive previews, which help accelerate iteration times
- Being game engine-independent. Beast has already been integrated into several leading game engines: Unreal®, Gamebryo® and Unity game engines.
- Beast can help enhance the visual quality of your game. Developers can achieve better artistic results with advanced global illumination.
- Turtle is a plug-in for Autodesk® Maya® 3D software. Turtle provides “baked lighting”, i.e. pre-computed lighting for sophisticated rendering and baking of game worlds, characters and objects.
- Beast middleware will continue to be sold as a standalone product.
- Autodesk plans to incorporate Turtle into future offerings, rather than selling it as a standalone product.
- Autodesk is accustomed to developing and selling middleware. In addition to Beast, we have two other types of middleware:
- Autodesk® HumanIK® middleware for character animation.
- Autodesk® Kynapse® middleware for artificial intelligence/spatial awareness.
- Illuminate Labs products are used primarily by AAA and AA game developers – many of whom are Autodesk clients.
- Beast has been integrated into several leading game engines (Unreal, Gamebryo and Unity) and is used for many types of games, ranging from AAA consoles and MMO’s, to handheld and social networking games.
- Illuminate Labs technology can serve as an interactive lighting solution for Previsualization, and for film and TV customers that want to increase the productivity of their lighting pipeline.
- Illuminate Labs customers include: A2M, Bioware, Guerilla Games, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, Insomniac Games, Radical Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment, THQ/Heavy Iron, Valve Software.
- Games that used Illuminate Labs products include: Dante’s Inferno™, Mortal Combat® VS. DC Universe, America’s Army 3, WET™, Gran Turismo®, Mass Effect™, Heavenly Sword™ video games
- Many Illuminate Labs customers rely on Beast and Turtle:
- To help increase the visual quality of their game
- For their powerful feature sets,
- For quicker iterations on the lighting of complex scenes,
- For ease of use and easy integration into existing pipelines
- For speed
Key Message #2: The acquisition of Illuminate Labs – a maker of interactive lighting technology for games – allows Autodesk to provide a more comprehensive solution to our customers. Illuminate Labs’ proven technology helps developers achieve better aesthetic results with advanced global illumination.
Key Message #3: Autodesk will develop and sell Illuminate Labs’ technology and support Illuminate Labs customers.
Supporting messages
Illuminate Labs Customer Testimonials
“We’ll use it in our future projects. I think it (Beast) will be the new standard for game lighting.”
Johannes Söderqvist, Art Director, EA Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment. 3D World, February 2009 on using Beast with Mirror’s Edge.
“Using Beast helped speed our lighting pipeline, and get better results faster. Our lighting artists were able to achieve some great results with the technology.” Reid Schneider, Executive Producer at EA
“Turtle allowed us to quickly iterate on the lighting of the 150+ levels in Dragon Age: Origins, and get great results.” Andreas Papathanasis, Senior Programmer – Dragon Age: Origins
Autodesk, FBX, HumanIK, Kynapse and Maya are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product and services offerings, and specifications and pricing at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. © 2010 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
