If you’re a reader of Cinefex magazine, you may have spotted several recent mentions of SpeedTree® in two July articles highlighting cinematic visual effects created for summer blockbusters Iron Man 3 and White House Down.
Iron Man 3:
In the July Cinefex story, Rough Around the Edges, Jody Duncan outlines the work of visual effects supervisor Christopher Townsend, who guided Iron Man 3 effects with the help of artists at 17 facilities from around the world. The story includes comments from Simon Stanley-Clamp, VFX supervisor at Cinesite, a London-based studio that used SpeedTree to create an aerial shot of the Stark factory. Referring to SpeedTree, Stanley-Clamp notes…
“It was used to place trees, match the foliage in the shot, and then extend that foliage out to completely populate this park area. That gave us more than enough variety. We were able to tweak trees on an individual basis, as well, to make it more random.”
White House Down:
In the same issue, editor Barbara Robertson’s To the Rescue article covers the White House Down visual effects collaboration headed by Uncharted Territory and including Method Studios, LUXX Studios, Hybride, Scanline VFX, Prime Focus VFX, Crazy Horse Effects and Mokko Studios. In a section of the story detailing CG creation of the White House grounds using trees modeled with SpeedTree, Ollie Rankin of Method Studios remarks…
“In addition to the eight to 10 iconic trees surrounding the White House, we tried to match the distribution of different species, and the size and leaf colors we saw in the in the aerial photography.
Describing how Method artists pre-cached animated trees in V-Ray native format, Rankin says…
“That gave us an entire layout of moving VR proxies, so we could render them quickly. Other vendors using V-Ray could also benefit from that proxy geometry. We also provided a Maya scene that represented the whole layout and referenced the proxy trees, and we provided the source SpeedTree files.”
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