The latest iteration of Unreal Engine includes the addition of some new powerful tools for foliage with open world games in mind. Populating the landscape with trees requires more than just randomly dropping your assets on a map. It’s about crafting and controlling the world your players inhabit. Placing your foliage using UE 4.8 procedural […]
Author Archives: Danny Oakes
Batman: Arkham Knight is the fourth entry in the critically acclaimed Arkham series and continues the story Rocksteady began in 2009 with Arkham Asylum. As with their previous two games, SpeedTree was used to add foliage to the dark streets of Gotham. Beginning inside the walls of the infamous Arkham Asylum, each game has expanded […]
Shroud of The Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is a forthcoming game from the creator of the Ultima series Richard Garriott, Starr Long, the director of Ultima Online, and Tracy Hickman, the author of Dragonlance. Now, fair warning, there are some people in this office who cut their gaming teeth on the Ultima series starting with Ultima II. To say […]
The return to Isla Nublar brings with it more tech innovations than just some dinosaurs they cooked up in a lab. Industrial Light & Magic made extensive use of SpeedTree to create the jungle landscapes of Jurassic World which serves as a reboot/sequel of the original classic. The original Jurassic Park served as a watershed moment […]
The release of Unity 5.1 brought some nice changes to how Unity handles SpeedTree LODs. The biggest of these changes involves the option to animate crossfades in the SpeedTree LOD group. Previously, Unity handled the LODs based on the distance from the model. This meant that as a tree moved to the billboard the crossfade […]
Lucy James hosts the weekly web series Reality Check on Gamespot.com and uses the series to illuminate the technology and science behind everyone’s favorite video games. After exploring some of the techniques that make open world games like The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt possible she delved further into two of the middleware tools involved: […]
7.1.2 We’ve updated our modeler for Unreal Engine 4. This update fixes several bugs as well as bringing improvements to how the modeler handles light mapping and an additional LOD. If you are currently a subscriber, simply log-in to your account on our store to download the update. New Features 1. More LODs for UE4 […]
We would like to say that The Witcher 3 has amazing looking foliage simply because it represents one of the deepest integrations of SpeedTree for games we’ve seen. However, the reality is that while SpeedTree is a really great resource, like any tool, how it is implemented in a game is more important than the tool […]
The list of movies using SpeedTree in 2015 continues to grow with almost every opening weekend. California studio WhiskeyTree has told us that they used SpeedTree in the upcoming retro-futurist film “Tomorrowland” starring George Clooney. “Tomorrowland” is partially set in a parallel dimension where technological optimism has created a pristine vision of what our future […]
To celebrate the world that CD Projekt Red has created in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, we are putting our UE4 and Unity 5 Asset packages on sale at our Speedstore for 55% off until Tuesday May 26th. As usual, our packages come with all the features that make SpeedTrees more than just a static […]