GrabCAD, a Boston-based company backed by Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures, has partnered with Lagoa, a cloud rendering solutions company, to bring Lagoa integration into GrabCAD Workbench.
“GrabCAD users love rendering, so it was important for us to deliver high-quality and high-performance rendering functionality as part of the GrabCAD experience,” said Hardi Meybaum, CEO of GrabCAD. “We’ve chosen to work with Lagoa because it delivers the high-quality results GrabCAD users expect without forcing users out of the GrabCAD application. This integration makes it easier to get started, and combines ease of use with top-tier capabilities like HDR environments and advanced materials effects, without downloads or installations. We’re excited to offer this to Workbench users.”
Lagoa’s 3D platform features an API system that enables third-party developers to integrate Lagoa 3D rendering features into their applications.
01 – Lagoa is a new top-funded tech offering focused on serving state-of-the-art cloud-based rendering and collaboration through your browser. There is also an iPad app.
With more than 15,000 users, Workbench is the easy way for engineers, designers and partners to manage, share and view CAD files. GrabCAD makes it easy for Workbench users to access top design tools through the GrabCAD Toolbox, which allows third-party applications to access Workbench files.
How It Works
Users select a file to render in GrabCAD Workbench, then select “Open in Lagoa,” and are ready to render. After a user has selected a model, they can modify materials, add lighting, select “Render,” and they’re done. Once they’re satisfied with their images, which take seconds, not hours to produce, they can save images back to their GrabCAD project. For engineers who want to use Lagoa in Workbench, GrabCAD is providing an introductory offer of two free hours of Lagoa processing time per month. Details are available at www.grabcad.com/Toolbox/Lagoa.
Architosh Analysis
We haven’t really written about GrabCAD Workbench much before. It’s a CAD process and CAD industry collaboration workflow solution that is quite solid and has some good people backing it. We see it having a great chance of thriving, even in this competitive segment of the market. With GrabCAD you can share, view and edit CAD models right in your web browser. GrabCAD is also a community with nearly 1 million members who have uploaded 339,597 CAD files. These are free community library CAD files.
We have written about Lagoa before. The company provides proprietary unbiased rendering from the cloud and it all works through your standards compliant web browser. We believe the link between all such apps like Lagoa and GrabCAD is WebGL which we have been writing about a lot lately. The partnership between GrabCAD and Lagoa makes a lot of sense. They are both on the bleeding edge of software development utilizing cloud based technology fed to modern browsers wherein the browser is the platform. We expect to see a lot more companies heading in this direction.