One of the noteworthy launches this week at the 2011 NAB Show in Vegas is Bakery Relight, the industry's first interactive, all-in-one lighting and rendering suite of tools, from the French-based software firm, The Bakery, co-owned by Erwan Maigret and Arnauld Lamorlette (who received a 2011 Technical Achievement Academy Award for co-developing a global illumination solution).

Several years in development, Relight is touted as a technical solution to support the progressive and iterative process of lighters and shaders (a refinement properties and details) with resolution feedback within seconds. The proprietary tool set also enables superior matching of CG illumination with composited live-action elements, which makes it useful for both animation and VFX.

The brainchild of Maigret (a technical lead on Shrek the Third, Shrek 2 and Madagascar) and Lamorlette (head of FX on Shrek the Third and Shrek 2), Relight, solves an important industry need. "Arnauld and I both have artistic and technical backgrounds and understand the artists' needs, and we wanted to build a company that focuses on technology that every studio can use," Maigret suggests. "Relight introduces new artistic possibilities: it solves the lighting and rendering bottleneck found at nearly all studios.

"If you look at Pixar and DreamWorks, they have the time and the money and the technologies to be able to afford to work on the image. That is exactly what we are doing because there is no such thing on the market. Basically, the process is to work on the final image -- to change the color -- just like a painter.

"We talked to artists at studios and found out that interactive lighting was their biggest need because animation is about spending artists' time; rendering is about how much time it's going to take and what you can handle. And we decided to deliver this kind of software to market so that it can be used by many people and cut down on the time in the render farm and let artists do lighting that won't take hours. Our research tells us that companies that use Relight can improve turnaround times by up to 300%."