Baking Floating Geometry with Maya's Turtle Renderer

phaedarus

Does anyone here actually use this plugin?

All of my google searches point towards a rather dated space station tutorial which doesn't go a job at all at easing someone in to using the software (not to mention the radical UI change made since).

I'm very disappointed with the overall lack of learning material for this seemingly powerful baking tool.

At, any rate, I'm trying to create a normal map by baking some floating geometry on to a low poly model but the results are somewhat iffy.

What are the most important parameters for controlling the envelope in Turtle so that I'm getting all of the geometry baked into the normal map?

Thanks.

malcolm

Where did you even get Turtle from? The reason all the learning material is gone is because Autodesk bought Illuminate labs and closed down their website. As far as I know the Turtle baker has been deprecated, the only way that you can legally get the software these days is to buy a creation suite from Autodesk. Hey can I buy a Turtle license? no you have to buy Mudbox, Maya, and Softimage if you want a single Turtle license. F that.

Beast is what the Turtle team is working on now, check it out looks interesting.
http://gameware.autodesk.com/beast/features/overview

Brendan

Development on both Beast and Turtle continue, as they're basically sister products and share a lot of underlying code (liquidlight, it used to be called).

What you want to do OP is make sure all the input meshes are selected (all the hp bits, including floaters), and select the LP as the output. The important part is the ray direction (if it's still called that). You can go inwards, in which case it'll go out along the normals (X) distance, then the first thing it hits coming back in will be what it records (this is best for floaters because it's what's on the 'outside' that gets baked). Outwards is the opposite way; the firth thing that gets hit going out from the normals gets baked, and I think there's a Closest option as well.

Distances can be set up as well; usually twice as far out as in, works well (it'll go 2 units out along he normals, then project back in 3 units until it's 1 inside the geometry).


Malcolm, I'm still rocking V5 (or something) in Maya 2012, but from the look of the manual it's basically the same. Effectively version 5.1 or 5.2. If you'd used any of the later Illuminatelabs version, you'd be right at home.


If anyone's looking for tutorials, they can be found here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=17208914


EDIT:
Yes, I am a Turtle/Beast fanboy. IlluminateLabs also had the single best customer service in history - they were basically the Valve of the CG industry, without the money or buying power or independence.

malcolm

I spoke with the autodesk sales rep and the lead programmer of turtle/beast when they were in town. They told us to use that new semi real time beast baker because they no longer update turtle, hence my comment about it being deprecated.

Brendan

That's a shame.
Turtle was bloody fast and damn good quality. That said, improvements to beast should bring it closer to Turtle, option-wise.