Turtle is a render engine mostly used for preparing game assets and baking the textures/lights. Although it may be useful for some people, a large part of the industry does not need it.
The problem is, Turtle nodes are very persistent. Once the plugin activated, it creates a couple of locked nodes which you cannot delete easily. Moreover, if that scene is opened on any other workstation, these nodes forces to load Turtle plugin.
Once the plugin loaded, it stays like that until you exit from Maya. So even if you close the scene and open a new one, since you already activated the Plugin, it will create those persistent nodes any other scene opened with that maya session.
To put that in simple, if its activated once, Turtle nodes spread like a virus in a studio or work group 🙂
There are various ways to get rid of the Turtle. Some of them are permanent.
Below code is a very simple solution to delete the locked turtle nodes. After deleting the nodes it unloads the plugin too. Unless the plugin will continue to create these nodes on each save/open
import pymel.core as pm
def killTurtle():
try:
pm.lockNode( 'TurtleDefaultBakeLayer', lock=False )
pm.delete('TurtleDefaultBakeLayer')
except:
pass
try:
pm.lockNode( 'TurtleBakeLayerManager', lock=False )
pm.delete('TurtleBakeLayerManager')
except:
pass
try:
pm.lockNode( 'TurtleRenderOptions', lock=False )
pm.delete('TurtleRenderOptions')
except:
pass
try:
pm.lockNode( 'TurtleUIOptions', lock=False )
pm.delete('TurtleUIOptions')
except:
pass
pm.unloadPlugin("Turtle.mll")
killTurtle()
