STAGE Alpha - Now Open!

I've been in the 3D industry for quite a while now (I started in 1998). And while it's not as long as others out there, I remember the day when we would fight over the SGI O2's in the lab in college. When we got an Octane, with TWO CPUs, we thought nothing could have been better. We would race to the lab each day, hoping that the Octane was open so that you could render your 640x480 raytraced image in less than 20 minutes in Maya (1.0).

I also remember the day when they upgraded the BYU Animation Lab to PC's with dedicated NVidia video cards. All of the sudden, those SGI's were just lumps of clay that no one wanted to use. The PC's probably gave us only a 1.5x speed up, but it was enough to get us all to switch. Rendering was the nemesis. No matter how cool your character, prop, or animation was, in the end, you still had to render it. And that took forever. Good thing BYU had a super computer that we could throw our renders at (if you got priority over NASA's iceberg tracking).

For me, rendering has always had its problems: speed, speed, and speed. CPU rendering took forever, but was super accurate. GPU rendering was incredibly faster, and is now just as accurate. But you still had to wait, frame by frame, to see what your animation or scene would look like. It was never truly interactive and accurate at the same time.

That is, until now.

With the advent of real-time graphic power house engines like Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, what took hours and days just a few years ago, now takes mere seconds, if not fractions of a second. What used to be called "interactive rendering" (the ability to move your view, and then wait for the render to resolve before your eyes), is now truly interactive, with no waiting for a perfectly ray-traced frame, moving as you drag it around, lights and shadows working beautifully together, and light bouncing around the scene. Lighting, environments, and 3D data can be visualized with physical accuracy like never before, with a realism that has never been available before.

Enter STAGE

Today, I want to introduce STAGE - a live, real-time 3D viewer that utilizes the power of Unreal Engine 4 to allow 3D creators from any industry to showcase and review their data in fully ray-traced environments and lighting with little to no setup needed. What used to take 30 minutes or more to set up and render now can be accomplished in less than 1 minute. Images can be rendered, animations can be created and rendered (coming soon), and live collaboration showcase and review sessions (coming soon on desktop & VR) can be created for any imported data.

We are building STAGE to take the time consuming process of scene setup, lighting, and rendering and make it nearly instantaneous. STAGE is about shortening the feedback and decision loop from hours or days to minutes or seconds, or immediate. No more need to set up a render, wait for it to finish, then email it to someone and wait for their response. With STAGE, import your data, pick an environment and lighting scenario (or customize these to your liking), and render at high resolution in fractions of a second. Want to share it with someone down the hall or across the world? Just send them a link, and let them jump into the live experience with you on their desktop, in VR, or on a tablet (future addition). There is so much more we are planning for STAGE, and we would love for you, no matter what your industry is, to come along with us.

Our STAGE Alpha release begins in early March, and we are currently accepting sign-ups and want to invite anyone interested to come be a part of the journey. Whether you are a 3D creator or someone who just needs to work with 3D data, we want STAGE to become the go-to tool for your photo real rendering and collaboration workflow.

STAGE - Simple, insanely fast 3D rendering and collaboration.

Join us and become a part of STAGE's development today!