There’s tons of ways to reduce triangle counts in the SpeedTree Modeler, but a big one that’s often overlooked is the Simplify tool. Simply put, Simplify reduces the number of polygons in your model by replacing complex geometry with images mapped to simple meshes. This means that you can start with a high-detail tree (2-300K […]
Author Archives: Chris King
At GDC last week, Epic Games shook up the video game industry: full source code access to Unreal Engine 4 for $19/month + 5% royalties. As some of you may know, SpeedTree is currently integrated into UE4, but up to now has only been made available to Epic’s AAA/non-subscription licensees. We were intrigued by the […]
As announced on Tuesday, SpeedTree® is coming to Unity 5. Immediately, questions arose about the level and quality of the integration and how the business model will work. Out of the box, Unity 5 and Unity 5 Pro will load and render SpeedTree models on most Unity-supported platforms, including mobile. The rendering code path includes […]
It’s always exciting for us to see how SpeedTree® users create amazing natural landscapes. We develop these tools and then let the imagination and skills of the visual effects community do what they do best. A member of this community sharing valuable VFX tools and training is instructor, owner and Chief Public Partner Chris Maynard […]
The White House has taken a real beating this summer at the movies. It saw no less than three takeovers by terrorists on the silver screen. First, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was attacked by Cobra in G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Then the president and a lone U.S. Capitol Police officer had to fight a criminal mastermind in […]
We’re often asked about tutorials. While there are numerous UDK/SpeedTree tutorials on YouTube, they’re using a pretty old version of SpeedTree, 5.0.2. We applaud the efforts of others to create their own tutorials, but these were created by our team and are intended to cover general modeling topics. We currently have five tutorials on-line for SpeedTree […]
With spring rolling into summer, this time of year is about graduations, outdoor cookouts, swimming pools and the summer movie season! That’s why we’re proud to list the following blockbusters for summer 2013 that used SpeedTree®, with a link to each movie’s listing on IMDB. G.I. Joe: Retaliation Star Trek Into Darkness Iron Man 3 The Great […]
Several games under development for the just-revealed PlayStation®4 will feature SpeedTree® for Games, and it was announced today that the game industry’s premier vegetation middleware fully supports the platform. We’re really excited about the PS4’s system architecture. We welcomed the eight symmetric x86 cores with open arms, as I suspect most developers will. The abundant […]
The SpeedTree® real-time/games pipeline involves three major components: SpeedTree Modeler: This is where video game animation artists create and edit vegetation models, in real-time or cinematic resolutions. In the Games version, LODs and wind are tuned in using an animated WYSIWYG window that mirrors the run-time SDK’s behavior. SpeedTree Compiler: Takes the models saved in […]
The IDV team has been working on a new edition of SpeedTree that’s targeted to the needs of architects and we’re excited to announce that “SpeedTree Architect” is now here! It combines precise modeling and rendering of realistic trees/plants with easy workflow into many leading 3D architectural visualization applications. We’ve packaged SpeedTree Architect to be the quickest, […]