Tripolygon, the South Korea startup making 3D solution for Unity and Unreal Engine announced on Tuesday that it had raised fresh investment in seed round funding led by Strong Ventures. Founded in 2018, Tripolygon’s software tools are set to revolutionize the thriving gaming market.
Making Advanced 3D modeling tools for engines
Tripolygon is developing 3D modeling tools targeting Unity and Unreal Engine users. Its tool ‘UModeler,’ currently on sale at the Unity Asset Store, is for low-polygon modeling and prototyping as a Unity extension plugin. It has received rave user reviews all over the world. And it was the runner-up of the Unity Awards 2018 Development Tool.
Also, Tripolygon has been developing UModeler X. This high-polygon 3D modeling tool can be used to make high-end content such as AAA games, movies, animation, architecture, and manufacturing, for Unity and Unreal engines.
The global game market is estimated at $178.3 billion, with over 50% of all mobile games and over 25% of Steam games being produced using Unity and Unreal Engine. Moreover, with the rapid growth of real-time graphics technology, these engines are actively used not only in games but also in various fields such as manufacturing, film, animation, and architecture, etc. Therefore, Tripolygon’s growth is expected with its technology, competitiveness, and game engine market’s scale.
Supporting the game developers with high-tech tools
Jaesik Hwang, CEO and Founder of Triplygon worked as a senior engine programmer for five years at Crytek, a global gaming company famous for Crysis. With the motto of ‘The Modeling tool most loved by game developers all over the world,’ he started to develop the 3D Modeling plugin, UModeler, for the Unity engine by himself.
Hwang says, “The existing modeling tools such as ProBuilder and BSP, etc. for Unity and Unreal engines are not enough to model 3D mesh assets and are limited to prototyping. In addition, 3D modeling tools such as 3Ds Max and Maya, which are frequently used in the game, movie, and animation industries, are too professional to learn with ease. Moreover, they are standalone software, so they involve data export/import problems, and their technologies cannot be used directly for real-time 3D contents development.”
“Tripolygon is focusing on resolving these problems by developing 3D modeling solutions optimized for real-time rendering contents. First, Tripolygon wants to develop a 3D modeling solution most loved by 14 million Unity and Unreal game developers around the world, and based on this; we want to develop 3D modeling contents that even everyone can easily enjoy,” Jaesik added.
“It is well known that Korea is a game powerhouse that makes great games. However, most engines or software that game developers use to make games are foreign software. Tripolygon’s product is 3D modeling software with a competitive edge in this market. We expect game developers around the world to use UModeler and UModeler X to create their games that are loved by users,”
Kihong Bae, the Managing Partner of Strong Ventures.
Through this investment, Tripolygon will focus on the development of UModeler X to enable game developers to model both low-polygon and high-polygon meshes without leaving their engines. Also, the business model will be upgraded to cover both B2C and B2B.
Tripolygon is a Primer Batch 16 company. Primer is one of the top accelerators of South Korea that has invested in some top-performing Korean startups. It has also been selected for TIPS, which is a government-led Tech InvestmentProgram.