Lagoa Launches, Blows Minds

I was invited to the beta of Lagoa.com (then called TeamUp) several months ago, and even in that early stage it blew my mind. As I toyed with a test scene, I couldn’t help feeling that I was staring into the future of CG — or at least a very interesting aspect of its future.

So what is it?

LagoaFerrariGarage
At it’s core, Lagoa is a cloud-based, photoreal CG renderer. In the simplest possible terms: You upload a scene from your favorite 3D package, hit render and watch the magic happen. With incredible speed, Lagoa produces photoreal imagery in seconds.

It’s incredibly satisfying to watch physically-based light glisten through your crystalline objects in about as much time as it takes to microwave some popcorn. (Or less.)

But wait, there’s more

Lagoa-UI

Lagoa is really a comprehensive, shared CG workspace. There’s a functioning node editor, a robust material system (bring your own or use Lagoa’s), an asset browser, an integrated chat room — all in your browser with no plug-ins required.

You can invite team members to collaborate in real-time or give you feedback on renders. I saw this happen during my testing period, and it reminded of the first time I collaborated edited a Google Doc. Except in this case, it was a 3D scene, which only made it that much more astounding.

Questions?

Lagoa’s not paying me or Motionographer to write this. I’m genuinely impressed by the software. But I’m also not a super demanding CG professional; I’m (at best) a hobbyist.

So I’m curious: What do you guys think about this? How would you use it? Do you have questions for the Lagoa team?

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About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

17 Comments

jens

looks very interesting! I had a quick look at their website and faq, it does not mention animation anywhere.

My question would be, can you upload point cache / geo cache data and render out an image sequence or is this more something for single frame product desigy work?

A brilliant start whatever the answer!

I know this is easier said than done but are you planing to include support for scene files from software like Maya / max etc. either by natively supporting their formats or via fbx in the future.

keep up the great work!

Thiago Costa

Jens, it’s only rendering static frames now – although we have motion blur and all the other things to support animation, it’s still in development.

jens

thanks for getting back, well let me know as soon as it renders animation :) What I’ve seen in the video + ability to render animation = unstoppable

dobermunk

It’s interesting to see someone making cloud render solutions available to prosumers. Lots of open questions, very interesting. So many options nowadays.

Dave Glanz

Uh, yeah…ACCOUNT CREATED. Damn this looks great.

Rouyu Li

neat idea, my only questions is how do you deal with the potential of terrabytes of particle data that software like fumefx and realflow generates.

Thiago Costa

simulation+rendering in the cloud = solved. It’s just a matter of time until you see it.

Mauricio N. Santos

Thiago,

I have to say how shocked me when I see the results. It is indescribably amazing your contribution to the world of CG!. You will make history!
Success!!!

Erick Schiele

This could change the Car business as well .. for clients ( at Car Companies ) and ad agencies working with car companies. I can also see this someday molding into software that works on Car Configurators etc… as well .. I think it is big news and very impressive.. the only hurdle is probably getting the car data accessed securely… give it time… pretty cool ….

Thiago Costa

Thanks for noticing! Definitely something we are exploring – some developers are studying our API to build their next generation Configurators on the Cloud. We take care of the backend and they only care with making the assets and their Configurator app.

Erick Schiele

Thiago,

I used to work for a large German company that has presence in Detroit.. I know their main business is configurators. I can see them trying to get involved with this … What a great tool set..

Can I use your email below to stay in touch ? I will be working with a new car company very soon and would like to talk to them about this

…. Best …. Erick

Thiago Costa

Certainly! Thanks.

Béls

You know when in the middle ages every new thing was considered the Devils work? Well this is something similar, i’m not too happy about easy to use and access online software s because I invested years of my life learning 3d,a ton of money, and didn’t do this for a hobby, this is my living, online platforms like this could eventually take away the need to hire a professional.

Thiago Costa

The value is changing. For example today anyone can buy a guitar, but it doesn’t mean anyone can play a guitar.
Even thou a lot more people play guitars, just a few people know how to make really good music.

Hiding the Piano won’t really make Pianists more valuable, in fact would just lower the value of the Art, because there will be less people in touch with Pianos and make the art more of a rarity. And rare things generally disappear or become a niche that few can appreciate.

So far the value of 3D has been on the computer, on the software and finding who know how to operate the software.
It should be easy to find people to operate the software, so the really good people can really stand out.

Back in the day if you had invested on an SGI and learned some obscure 3D app of the time, you would be saying that the Windows platform was allowing more people to use 3d tools – and that the proliferation of 3D on PC’s was a bad thing because the professionals were on an SGI.

That is to say I completely disagree with your statement.

-Thiago

anony

I am impressed even though I only toyed with it for a few seconds. Some thing I wouldn’t mind investing in as businessman.

anony

In fact, any investment opportunities available?

Thiago Costa

thiago at lagoa dot com

Comments are closed.