Lagoa Multiphysics

The success of Lagoa Multiphysics, from Costa’s company Lagoa Technologies, is abundantly clear – it’s now available in Autodesk Softimage, which picked up the solver as part of its premium suite release.

The simulations possible with Costa’s Lagoa Physics Engine can be seen in his test renderings of grains, liquids and cloths – each realised using Softimage’s ICE as the base 3D application. The simulator was mostly written in C++ before it was ported into ICE. Costa says ICE is a true development environment, because you’re using the same environment to develop that the user is using. Costa enjoyed using the ICE development environment “CE is very fast to develop, you can reach really quick results in zero time.” Coata has been developing Lagoa since 2008.

Costa posted an example video on the net mid-2010, and it has been downloaded some 1.2 million times since. The video is called ‘Multiphysics’ since he was modeling often different physics problems on the same solver. The ‘grain’ sims in the video generally took between one and six minutes to compute for 350 frames. Although there are a million or so points, the final render was less than one minute.

Originally from Brazil, Costa now lives in Montreal, Canada. He had previously contributed to such projects as G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and CafeFX and Assassin’s Creed: Lineage and Predators at Hybride. Costa resigned last year from Ubisoft and to focus all his time on Lagoa Technologies.

Additional audio interview available for fxinsider members

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Download the audio of the entire original interview with Thiago Costa here – exclusively for Insider members

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