Lagoa Offers Cloud Based Collaborative 3D Rendering
Back in 2010 Thiago Costa wrote the Lagoa multiphysics simulator, something that is best explained by this video.
He licensed it to Autodesk and Ubisoft Digital Arts, the company he worked before left to found Lagoa Technologies in September 2010. Thiago is well known in the media and entertainment industry and has received screen credits for block buster movies like Predators and G.I. Joe – Rise of the Cobra.
It didn’t take Thiago long to realize the shift to the cloud and that led him to start Lagoa, a collaborative platform for creating and visualizing in 3D using nothing but a web browser. By collaborative I mean you can work with others in the same design space. I strongly recommend you take the time to see this Lagoa launch video.
You can start by creating an account for free at Lagoa. The free account gets you:
- 5 hours of rendering per month
- unlimited public projects
- 0 private projects
- 1 GB of cloud storage
You can start a project from scratch or by making use of a template.
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I picked “Product Shot” and ended up with this. And yes, this is a screenshot of my Firefox browser, not some complex Windows rendering application.
Click to enlarge
I hit the render button and the scene started rendering using progressive ray tracing. I spent some time familiarizing myself with the multitude of buttons and menus items and what they did and found that I could navigate around the 3D view, move objects around the scene, change material properties and environment conditions and a whole lot more. As worked with the scene it got rendered automatically on the cloud and the image was sent to my browser. Here is a screenshot of a progressive render in progress as I moved objects around the scene.
I cleared the scene and decided to upload one of my own models. Lagoa supports these formats.
After some messing around I ended up with this.
It is important to note that all this happened in a web browser. I didn’t need to download and install anything other software. Also, if I had added someone else to my project both of us would be able to move objects around, adjust scene properties and see the same rendered image in our browsers at the same instant. This is truly revolutionary and is an indication of where things are headed with respect to cloud computing.
Lagoa uses Amazon Web Services for its cloud infrastructure. It uses its home grown rendering engine called MultiOptics which is designed for performance and scalability.
Lagoa was launched on 2nd April 2013 and as of this writing there were more than 12,000 public projects. The service already has more than 8,000 users.
Click here to create your free account at Lagoa.