3D investment

Enterprise Ventures, an independent venture and growth capital fund manager, has completed an investment in Bradford University spin-out Tangentix.

Tangentix has been established to commercialise a new technology for handling 3D graphic models that have been developed by a team at the university led by Prof Hassan Ugail.

A major difficulty in creating practical objects on a computer is the lack of methods for defining them in an easy and intuitive fashion.

Conventional methods typically use polynomial patches (for example, Non Uniform Rational B-Splines or NURBS), which often require hundreds of control points to represent a realistic object. Such 'spline'-based patches often do not exactly meet at the boundaries and consequently need to be trimmed or stitched in order to close the surface of the object in question.

Ugail's method differs from conventional spline-based techniques in that it enables the user to create the geometry of realistic objects based upon the surface information at the character lines or edges of the object to be designed.