01. MESH Consultants
02.
BIM in the Browser
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Real-time Collaboration On Large Data Sets.
VR And Web Visualization.
You Can Have It All.
01. Mesh Consultants
Challenge: Mesh Consultants needed to visualize and share complex lattice data required for 3D printing. Traditional techniques fell short - either the data was too heavy and slow to load or the rending wasn’t detailed and accurate enough. Additionally remote teams often lacked the sophisticated computers needed to view the rendering.
Solution: Zea Inc. developed a custom ray marching technique to render the complex lattices and strike a balance between performance and quality rendering. Zea Drive, Zea’s cloud computing platform, facilitated the calculations and Zea’s WebGL deployment allowed remote teams to view the renderings in a browser.
Visualizing Lattices for 3D Printing
How geometry experts MESH Consultants used Zea’s rendering engine to visualize large lattices for 3D printing.
3D printed lattices are strong, light and cost effective, but as they become more complex it is often difficult to render them with traditional techniques. Geometry studio MESH Consultants Inc. wanted to accurately visualize such lattices and present them to their clients.
They turned to Zea, as both companies share a passion for solving 3D problems, but from differing perspectives. MESH Consultants solves complex problems in geometry and Zea develops a web-based visualization and collaboration platform.
Too Big and Too Slow: MESH Consultants tried using 3D model formats such as OBJ to render their lattices, but had to choose between quality visualizations that took up gigabytes of space or low-quality renders that didn’t accurately represent the surface to be printed.
These files were also slow to load and view, and required powerful machines with the correct software. This made sharing the designs with clients difficult.
The Zea Solution: While rendering large meshes generated from the lattices is possible in the the Zea Engine, the performance was not ideal and load times prohibitively long. Zea proposed taking advantage of the flexibility of the Zea platform to create a custom renderer.
The Lattice Renderer was designed to run in the browser using WebGL so it could be easily shared with clients. This meant pushing WebGL to its limits to strike a balance between quality and performance.
The Zea Solution
The ray marching algorithm steps though the scene querying for the closest surface.
Ray marching, a rendering technique used for medical imaging or rendering photo-realistic volumetrics and procedural environments, was chosen to render the lattices.
It is a variant on ray casting where the image is generated by iteratively stepping through a volume and calculating a color value. Precision can be controlled via the number of samples used, meaning that obscured or distant parts of the lattice can be rendered with less precision until they come into view.
In addition to ray marching, ray tracing was used as a culling step to eliminate expensive raymarching operations.
Adjusting Parameters and Debugging
The ray marching algorithm steps though the scene querying for the closest surface.
With ray marching the rendered surface is generated dynamically in the GPU, allowing users to tweak parameters such as quality, smoothing, beam radius and vertex bulge on the fly.
A debugging mode provides feedback on the rendering cost of the surface. Regions rendered using higher quality ray marching can be compared against areas using cheaper ray tracing.
Lattices in the Cloud
A lattice file being previewed in Zea Drive.
“You are a thousand times more likely to engage a client with a URL than asking them to download and install something.”
- Daniel Hambleton, Director of MESH Consultants
MESH Consultants’ lattices were developed in a custom format which required some pre-processing. Zea utilized cloud compute to allow that to happen in the background without using resources on the user’s hardware.
By dragging a lattice file into Zea Drive, MESH Consultants can instantly process their files, which clients can then view from their browser.
Virtual Reality: The Zea platform also supports virtual reality (VR), so MESH Consultants can collaboratively demonstrate their lattice designs to their clients in VR.
What’s Next? Zea and MESH Consultants will continue working together to refine the Lattice Renderer and make it even easier to visualize complex 3D printing lattices in the browser.
MESH Consultants: Toronto-based MESH Consultants Inc. are at the cutting edge of complex geometric simulation. They help designers, architects, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs by building software, developing algorithms, running simulations, conducting research projects, and generally solving critical geometry problems. www.meshconsultants.ca
Zea: Zea are located in Montréal and provide a web-based platform for design visualization and project management. They offer software development and visualization services leveraging their custom rendering engine and cloud infrastructure. www.zea.live