Looking for Turtle basic tutorial

This is directed specifically at Chosen but is anyone else wants to help out please do. As a novice builder and Maya user I have learned a great deal just from reading Chosen's posts and very much appreciate the time and effort he puts into explaining things so thoroughly. In a few of his posts he recommended using Turtle for rendering and baking in Maya. I went ahead and purchased Turtle from Illuminate Labs a while back. The problem I had was that their tutorials were to advanced for me and I couldn't find anything basic.

I realized that one basic Turtle tutorial wouldn't cover all the variables when it comes to lighting and rendering sculpties for SL in Maya but if Chosen or anyone else knows of a good link it would be much appreciated.

Can you be a little more specific about just how basic do you need?

Please don't take this as dismissive in any way, but between the Turtle manual, which explains what each and every setting does, and the tutorials on Illuminate Labs' site, which demonstrate how to use them, the bases are pretty well covered.

To boil it down as far as possible, the procedure is this (assuming you've already got a project set up with a proper directory structure, and that you've got Turtle loaded):

1. Add your selected object(s) to the Layer Members list,

2. Apply settings.

3. Render.

Those most basic steps couldn't be simpler. The specifics get more complicated, of course, but it's still VERY simple compared with other renderers. I'm not quite sure how to help you without knowing where you're getting lost.


For the actual commands, here's the most basic way I can think to explain:

First, create an object, put a material on it, and set up whatever lighting scheme you want to use. (Note, scene lights aren't always necessary with Turtle, since you can use its built-in skylight.) Then do the following.

1. Open up Turtle's Bake Layer Editor (Rendering section of Maya -> Light/Shading -> Bake Layer Editor (TURTLE)). In any Maya viewer pane, or in the Hypergraph or Outliner, select the object(s) you'd like to bake. In the Turtle Bake Layer Editor dialog, click the Add Selected button to add the selected object to Layer Members list. Everything in that list will be baked. Anything not in the list will not be.

2. Go into your Render Settings. Make sure Turtle is selected as the renderer to use, and that Turtle itself is set to Texture Bake mode. Now, go into the various Turtle tabs and settings trees, and apply whatever settings you want to use. If you don't know what a particular setting does, look it up in the manual. The reading is a little dry, but it's quite thorough.

Note, if you'll be baking textures with NURBS surfaces, you'll need to change one of Turtle's default settings. The Output File naming convention, by default will be "baked_$p_$s.$e". Change the "$s" to "$t", or else you can end up with each new texture overwriting the last. There's nothing worse than coming back 6 hours later, after having let a whole scene full of textures bake, only to discover you've only got one image in the folder.

3. Once you've got everything set the way you want it, hit the Render button. Sit back, and watch the magic happen.


Without getting into the mechanics of how to create whatever shaders you'd like to be using, which would be far beyond the scope of a Turtle-centric tutorial, and without diving into what all of Turtle's various settings do, which is what the manual is for, I'm not sure what else to cover.

I hope this has been helpful, but I don't feel like I've said very much. Do you have any more specific questions?

What it boils down to is although I have developed some proficiency using the Maya manipulators on the NURBS hulls and control vertexes to get my desired shape, when it comes to lighting and rendering I'm lost. I'll setup a few different lights that look okay in the scene view but when I render them they always look to dark. It sounded like Turtle made the whole rendering process a lot simpler. I have downloaded the pdf's for advanced lighting, advanced baking as well as the Turtle 4.1 Reference Manual and tried to figure out the basics from them.

I guess what I was hoping to find was a tutorial of a simple NURBS object say a wood chair for example and see what steps others use to add some simple lighting to the scene, render and bake the texture for use on a SL sculpty. All I do now once I have my NURBS shape is use a numbered CV grid that helps in getting a texture aligned properly in Photoshop. Then I just upload the texture to SL separate from the sculpty .bmp without any regard to lighting and rendering.

I've seen pictures of some of your rendered furniture and they look really beautiful. They make me feel ashamed of my crude attempts. I certainly don't expect to achieve your level of proficiency as I'm sure you have spent years working with Maya to get to the point your are now but we all have to start somewhere.

Oh and just the few basic steps you listed above help a lot thanks.

Thanks for the clarification. What you're asking for is not quite a Turtle tutorial, but more of an Intro To Lighting 101 sort of thing, with a nod toward Turtle for things like the skylight. That sounds like it would be worth the time to create. I'll try to put something together some time this week. I'll post it in a new thread, so the tutorial itself will be the original post. Then, if you or anyone else has any questions on it, or anything to add to it, you can jump right in from there.

In the mean time, I guess if there's one lesson you can take a way from your experience so far, it's this. Turtle is a great time saver, in that it puts almost all the rendering options and settings into one convenient place, but it's not a shortcut to circumvent any work that must be done within the actual scene, if that makes sense. If you want well lit textures, you need to create a well lit scene. That's not something the renderer has any direct control over (with the exception of the aforementioned skylight).

Look for that tutorial in the next few days, assuming I don't get overwhelmed with any other projects.

Thanks Chosen for taking an interest. I just realized that I posted this under building when maybe it should have been in the texturing forum.