Blog

Photogrammetry models allow us to capture the world around in exquisite detail — but that detail often comes with a drawback: large models don't perform well in real-time rendering. Whether you use them in a game-engine or display them on a website, detail is lost in optimizing models for performance. In the following I will show you how to turn...

In the pursuit of efficient 3D content streaming, data compression is essential. To understand where and how Umbra uses compression, I am going to briefly explain our processing pipeline. In short, Umbra encodes arbitrary 3D scenes into a hierarchical representation and stores it in our Cloud platform for high-performance over-the-network...

Umbra's backend enables easy optimization and delivery of high-resolution, high-performance 3D models to web browsers and native apps. Content developers can forget the polygon, resolution and memory limitations and simply upload all 3D content in full resolution. As a result, meshes to us are like paintings to an artist: never good enough and...

It’s been a while since we’ve shared what we’ve been up to… but the good thing is that we’ve been up to a lot! Below you can find a collection of updates we’ve pushed live during the last weeks.  

Laser scanning produces exceptionally detailed 3D point clouds of real-world locations, but there are often lots of missing areas that the scanner didn't see. Is it possible to bring them back somehow?

Recently I've been looking into solving the visibility of any volume from any volume. Specifically, given two volumes, do any two points within them see each other? Implementing a visibility query that answers this could be the ultimate tool for occlusion culling and sort of a fundamental building block for other visibility operations. After all,...

In computer graphics, there are multiple different ways to represent 3D geometry. Basically, these can be broken down to three different groups: volumetric representations with a set of polyhedrons, surface representations with a set of polygons and point clouds with a set of points. All of these have advantages and limitations for different use...

Our goal is to capture the real world into a virtual 3D model at the highest possible resolution. This is a step-by-step tutorial on how the content in the Love Bridge demo was made. (You can also skip to the end to see the live demo)

A while ago, I wrote about a scalable pipeline for processing point clouds. While the text gave an overview of what such a pipeline might look like, it was quite abstract. This time, instead of hand-waving on a very high level, I’m going to present some actual results.

In the grand scheme of things, Umbra is a productivity tool and our goal is to help our customers work more efficiently. We respect our customers' time and strive to not keep them waiting, as doing so would be counterproductive to our goal. Umbra would simply not be useful if it weren't so snappy!