The launch of Deep Paint was the first significant step in his vision of making the use of 3D graphics as easy as text and 2D images. This was also a major contributor to the growth of Right Hemisphere as Deep Paint challenged and vied for industry leadership and subsequently even became known as Photoshop’s best friend. The product was the first generation of a large family of successful painting and drawing products that included Deep Paint 3D and Deep UV. These products were subsequently commercialized under the generic brand name “Deep” to build on the tremendous success and brand recognition enjoyed by Deep Paint.
The success of Deep Paint established the Right Hemisphere brand which subsequently resulted in video game animators from Microsoft (Xbox), Nintendo and PlayStation along with Special effects designers from the major film studios such as Fox, Warner and Sony as well as 3D video editors lining up for Right Hemisphere’s new products. The Company made full use of these opportunities though this was not their expected target market by embracing this opportunity and thus Deep Paint along with its associated software such as Texture weapons and Ray Gun became household names in the entertainment graphics and animation game technology.
Right Hemisphere’s tool kits helped to further raise the quality and realism of 3D graphics, however they were still not as easy to use as text and 2D graphics and thus the quest continued. The Next major push forward came from an unexpected source – Russia, where Thomas and Revill founds out about software development work done by two young Russians on the internet. Vladmir Noskov and Alexander Chelemekhov both with Masters of Computer Science and in their late 20’s had developed a product called Perm – based X Dimension Software.
The software enabled users to view 3D models online in any file formats and as described by Thomas “their technology certainly helped us with our strategic direction” as it gave Right Hemisphere an opportunity to add new products to their already successful range as well as strengthening the ability of their existing products to integrate without difficulty with other products. They thus successfully managed to convince the Russians to enter into a Joint venture with Right Hemisphere and subsequently move to New Zealand.
The introduction of the new product along with greater understanding of the market based on their experience in engineering design software led to the Company’s aspirations moving away from its initial mission of becoming a global leader in complex engineering 3D graphics to seeking to become a global leader in Product Graphics Management (PGM). Product Graphics Management (PGM) was essentially the concept that propelled Right Hemisphere into the limelight. PGM aimed to bridge the gap due to training centres, sales and marketing departments being unable to access the complex CAD design files made by engineers.
This was attributed due to their huge sizes as well as their complexity that in effect resulted in their inability in being shared easily across the organization and thus they remained in the exclusive domain of the engineers with other departments being unable to contribute for any further product enhancement. Right Hemisphere’s PGM system addressed this situation / inefficiency by offering their compelling enterprise communication and collaboration solution built to work with any tools, infrastructure and applications that were already in place.
The aim of their PGM system was to “streamline and automate painful manual processes”. The PGM system combined their know – how in entertainment graphics and game technology along with using all the brilliant CAD geometry that exists and turned them into games to teach people how to use 3D designs. The PGM also made the Company realize that they could reach their goal of making 3D more accessible by following on this path.
The development of the complex PGM software was funded by their other successful software tools namely Deep Paint, however the growth of the PGM caused the company to scale back on Deep Paint and subsequently in 2002 they decided to completely stop development of Deep Paint in order to concentrate all their resources on developing complex PGM software systems. The PGM helped in creating a new and still emerging industry with no boundaries or limitations of growth. This new market owned by Right Hemisphere with their product being termed as a solution to a firms’ 3D graphic problem and costs.
Right Hemisphere labelled their market / product as an automated re-purposing and management of engineering CAD data for training, documentation, marketing and visualization or aptly described as Enterprise Visual Communication (EVS). (Dufour, Erakovic et al. 2007) Right Hemisphere marketed the product to potential users by stating that firms’ would achieve major savings “sooner rather than later” as it would allow firms’ to get the most out of 3D CAD data which can further be described by the example of a new aircraft manual containing 50,000 illustrations costing over US $17 million to put together.
The use of PGM would cut these costs by up to 80% and likewise these cost savings could be applicable to any industry. A significant hurdle in the growth of PGM was that people in other functions (non technical) were not accustomed to complexities associated with 3D drawings and thus the challenge was to provide these users with the ability to integrate and manipulate complex graphical data in everyday software applications.
Right Hemisphere’s software made this possible by converting complex 3D CAD diagrams into an interactive 3D PDF (Portable Document Format) that could then be sent via email as they were relatively small in size approximately 500kb. The 3D PDF document also came with ability to rotate and view from any angle thus giving non technical users the chance to contribute towards enhancing product designs.