Lagoa Puts Pro-Level 3D Image Tools in the Cloud

3D imagery, the kind that gives depth and, sometimes, artificial reality to static images is often astonishing and almost always hard to create. Every time you see another Apple iWatch or iPhone 6 concept design, you might want to stop for a moment and think about what it took to build that hyper-realistic JPEG. 3D image creation requires expertise and expensive hardware and software. Canadian startup Lagoa, however, seeks to change that equation, putting powerful 3D rendering tools in the cloud, with access via your web browser.

""Everyone needs to render when working with 3D content, but traditionally that demands enormous compute power and a lot of patience. We made it fast, collaborative, and photoreal," Lagoa CEO Thiago Costa told me from his Quebec-based office. He founded the company last year after a 10-year career in visual effects and game development that included creating some of the eye-popping imagery in the film GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra. Lagoa Technologies initially made its mark with an eye-popping physics engine called "Multiphysics." This video demonstration (below) eventually garnered almost 2 million views and the technology became a part of 3D powerhouses Autodesk via the Lagoa Multiphysics plugin for Softimage.

Costa, though, wanted to bring the power of 3D to the browser. The concept behind Lagoa is simple and smart. It's a real-time, Web based, collaborative 3D manipulation platform that requires no software installation or localized rendering power. Lagoa is not for 3D newbies. It's a powerful environment full of rich controls for manipulating pre-built 3D objects, scenes, light sources, textures and materials.

Cloud-based 3D solutions are not new. Last year Pixar and Greenbutton partnered up to launch RenderMan On Demand, a cloud based animation rendering solution. Costa explained that Lagoa is not the same. With RenderMan On Demand, you still need local hardware and software to build and manipulate the 3D imagery.

Lagoa does not allow you to generate new 3D objects. Instead, you import AutoCAD or .OBJ files. The platform also comes with a collection of pre-built objects you can add to your images. However, once you put the 3D objects inside Lagoa, you can, among other things, manipulate the materials (change metal to gold or glass, for example), add and adjust lighting and position the camera.

The next step is outputting a final high-resolution 3D JPEG or EXR file. The latter is an HD bitmap image.

Lagoa, which launched earlier this month and now has about 4,000 users, offers up to five hours of free rendering per month and a gigabyte of storage on their servers. For more than that, you pay $35 a month, but costs rise as you add more rendering hours. Costa says they also have enterprise-level plans.

Costa took me on a tour of the Lagoa interface (it requires Chrome or Firefox with Web GL) where together we worked on and manipulated 3D renderings of an engine and a dragon. The dragon is part of their image library and the engine was built outside Lagoa. We were able to spin around the objects and the scene and soon I was dragging and dropping materials, changing the dragon from metal to glass, and adding and removing light sources. While the dragon was a single 3D object, the motor was actually comprised of dozens of pieces, each of which I could select and change. Lagoa does real-time image rendering, but manages to not slow you down as you work. It does so by first delivering a grainy image that it resolves to high-quality while you work.

I tested and wrote about 3D creation and rendering tools in the '90s, so I have a working knowledge of 3D creation. Those not familiar with it will find the interface a bit confusing, but then it's really an environment for pros and creative types.

Eventually Lagoa may support 3D object creation and even animation. If they get that done and maybe make the tool just a little bit more user friendly, this could become a new content creation tool for the masses. Just imagine how impressed your friends would be if your social feed included homemade 3D images and, someday, animations.

You can learn more about Lagoa in the new video below.

Lagoa.com – launch video from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

Images courtesy of Lagoa; Video courtesy of Vimeo, Thiago Costa