NGrain's Unique Volumetric Rendering For The Masses

nGrain has attracted the support of both Intel and Microsoft with its technology.

Over at the Intel booth we found a very interesting company out of Vancouver, Canada. nGrain represents 3D objects the other way. The game way is to draw surfaces and use a bunch of polygons meshed together (actually, triangles) to create an object's surface. nGrain goes for volume graphics - the object is based on a set of discrete points in space, volume elements, which have both X, Y, and Z coordinates. Creating volume renderings really does give an object solid properties (yes, it can also be called solid modeling, or volumetric rendering).

So, nGrain allows you to add an attribute like density or temperature to its objects. Volume rendering is supposed to remove any of the tricks that you typically see associated with polygonal rendering, although polygonal renderings can look a lot sexier, and more realistic, because they can fool the eye into thinking that.

Running a volumetric model on a Tablet PC: the CAD industry can go mobile.

Volume rendering aside, what makes the nGrain approach so unique is that the company takes existing CAD data and renders it in a way that it can be accessible on something like a Tablet PC, for example. nGrain actually converts large polygonal models into its own proprietary format, and renders them using its own rendering algorithm that can even give you great results running in software-only mode. So, no GPU, no worries.

A typical model of a Jet Liner might be over 1.2 GB large and have over 400 parts, but in the nGrain format it is a mere 2-MB big. So, it makes it a lot easier for CAD users to share their model data and collaborate with other users across a variety of platforms and viewing options. The actual model data is not compromised either, because in the first instance, a company does not want to see its complex CAD model being moved around different devices (that's the company's IP, in effect), and secondly, you can't render a 1.2 GB or 200-MB CAD file on a Tablet PC, or even on the average desktop. Very cool stuff. Check out www.ngrain.com . There's hope for computer graphics start-ups, yet.