Taitopia: Why Build the Next-gen Cloud Render?

Taitopia OfficialTaitopia OfficialAugust 18, 2023

Taitopia to the Rescue

3D rendering has always been tough. The process itself is time-consuming, often resulting in hours, or even overnight, of waiting, especially in the field of industrial design where visual appeal is the key to delivering design concepts. Another problem is the need for powerful hardware, as they are often expensive and can be hardly carried around. As part of an efficient workflow, maintaining a local asset library becomes essential but proves to be a cumbersome task.

Decades of progresses in rendering software have been bringing the graphic quality to new heights, however, these conventional approaches still fall short on turning 3D rendering truly effortless. To conquer these challenges, we firmly believe in thinking outside the box by embracing an evolutionary leap of computing: the power of the cloud. This very belief led us to create Taitopia, the world's first cloud-native photorealistic renderer.

Render Everywhere

Today we have already gotten used to working on productivity tasks fully online, but rendering on-the-go has been so much of a headache. Imagine you need to work from home or fly to another city while working on an important project. With common rendering tools, you have to select one of the painful choices to work remotely: You may carry a huge workstation laptop that probably gives you quite a bit weight training, runs almost as loud as a jet engine when rendering, and drains the battery as fast as your flight goes in case you can't find a power outlet. Or you may install your renderer on a normal business laptop then live with extremely slow renders, and MacBook is not even an option if your renderer supports Windows only. Alternatively, you may set up a remote desktop connection from your laptop to your office computer to avoid these problems, but once there is any connection issue from your office, your only hope is to call a colleague at work for help.

But what if your next rendering tool could be as convenient as Google Docs? This is exactly where Taitopia comes to your rescue. Taitopia unleashes your creativity with the ability to render everywhere. Whether you are in your office, at home, or in a coffee shop, log in to Taitopia and you can immediately work on complex render tasks anywhere on any device.

Taitopia in laptop

Blazingly Fast

Many users we spoke to were instantly struck by the incredible speed of Taitopia. Taitopia uses its own path-tracing rendering engine developed from the ground up for the cloud, which enables blazingly fast interactive photorealistic rendering (IPR) just within your browser. Tempting as they sound in trailer videos or keynote talks, state-of-the-art rendering algorithms and graphics hardware have been a privilege. A high-end graphics card costs a fortune and you may hesitate whether it is worth upgrading. Even if you have already geared up, your good old renderer likely doesn't support the latest hardware features that triple-A games have advertised, or its GPU rendering gives incorrect results, so you have to spend hours on rendering one single image with CPU. Leveraging efficient rendering algorithms built for massive computing power on the cloud, Taitopia allows you to access such state of the art at your fingertips and delivers a rendering experience that even surpasses most locally-installed rendering tools, as well as a 3 times faster speed in production-level image and video rendering.

Easy to Use

The ease with Taitopia even comes before you use it — there is absolutely no installation. Open a browser window and log in to your account, then you are immediately locked and loaded for your render shot. Heading onto the user interface, some conventional rendering tools cannot be navigated without a cheatsheet of shortcuts, and some others require finding your way out of multiple menus and dialogs before making a simplest edit to your scene. At Taitopia, we believe this isn't the way rendering has to be, and we strive to deliver a user experience that is pleasant as well as intuitive. You don't have to be an expert in computer graphics to master Taitopia. Complex materials and lighting can be composed by simple drags, drops, and clicks, and all you have to do is to take your product visuals to perfection.

If you have played with cloud rendering through render farms, you probably might remember their hassles. First, a test drive on the render farm is necessary to see whether it produces the same results as your local machine. Upon any slight change to your project, you have to re-upload the whole file before starting another render job. Instead, Taitopia is fully cloud-native, which means that your "render farm" is exactly the same as what you see in your browser without any unmatched effects or manual syncing.

Taitopia also makes your 3D assets management a breeze. Unlike traditional tools where you keep your files locally or use a cloud drive as merely a backup, all your data on Taitopia fully resides on the cloud. You can say goodbye to looping Dropbox or Google Drive files back and forth between revisions and team members, because Taitopia provides a single source of truth for all of your projects. Taitopia supports models exported from nearly all modeling or 3D design applications, and in case you need more ingredients, Taitopia also offers a vast cloud asset library with thousands of models, materials, and scene templates free for commercial use.

More to Come

After one year of development, we proudly launched Taitopia. When we set out to make a next-gen browser-based renderer, we had no idea how hard it would be, but finally, we were able to put all the puzzle pieces together. We built a lightning-fast cloud renderer, made a modern browser UI that seamlessly work with it, and even beat internet ping to make it smoother than leading local renderers. As we invited our alpha users in industrial design to explore Taitopia, we were thrilled to find that Taitopia's outstanding speed and quality had reached their high standards:

A lot of similarities (to the best existing renderers) in terms of usability, but dare I say it has the upper hand in a lot of places.

Every time I always made a step back (from other software than my usual renderer), but this is the first time that I really see a possible competitor.

This thing is insane! Each picture took less than a minute to render in my laptop browser.

We are already the first online 3D tool that offers advanced rendering features including material graph editor and environment lighting customization, and we are continuously working on something new for Taitopia. Looking forward, we are soon to ship a full-fledged timeline and keyframe animation system so that you can create much more vivid animations for your scene. We are also working on supporting displacement textures to greatly enhance details to your product, allowing for sharing your scene by a link that can be easily accessed to your collaborators or stakeholders, as well as many more exciting stuffs.

Switching to Taitopia not only opens up amazingly new possibilities on how product visualization can be done, but might also transform your lifestyle as a 3D designer. If you are a freelancer, you can enjoy traveling the world with stunning renders while others are struggling to invest in a powerful workstation. If you are running a design firm, your team will no longer be bothered by heat and noise produced by the computers or occasionally lost or broken files, because now everything related to rendering happens on the cloud. Despite Taitopia's adolescence, the huge potential of cloud computing will make what was unfathomable for decades-old renderers now a well possibility for Taitopia. Bringing recent advances in generative machine learning to enhance your renders with a line of text, or launching a supercomputer that completes a highly detailed video render in minutes, you will help shape the future of Taitopia as an early adopter.

The development of Taitopia has been an electrifying adventure. Welcome to the next generation of cloud render, and happy rendering everywhere.

About the Authors

Andrew Sun is part of the Taitopia team and works in both product management and software engineering. Andrew obtained his Ph.D. Degree at the University of Minnesota with research focuses on simulation, machine learning, and high-performance computing. Andrew has extensive experience in 3D design spanning various fields from scientific visualization to game development.