The world just can’t won’t wait for Autodesk to deliver point cloud functionality in its products.
Alice Labs, a start up company based in the Netherlands just informed us their Autodesk Maya plug-in product, Studio Clouds is entering closed beta testing. We spoke with co-owner and investor, Elmer Bol this morning about the new product which was started just 18 months ago. Bol claims Studio Clouds has been stress tested by bringing 4 billion points inside Maya. Built on a new 64-bit engine, the product has two components, a two-pass, processing engine which provides simple viewing and measurement capabilities and a plug-in for Maya. Initial processing of 1 billion points takes approximately 4 hours, depending on the hardware, according to Bol. Bol says processing time scales linearly with the number of points; the main constraint is disk I/O. Studio Clouds does not have registration capabilities, yet. However, Maya rendering and shading of point cloud data is in rev 1.
The company is initially targeting entertainment, gaming,architectural and forensic markets. A 3ds Max version is under development as is a server version to allow streaming to multiple workstations.
