SpeedTree: Games, Movies, and… Defense Contracting Work??

SpeedTree is the video game industry’s leading middleware solution for modeling and real time rendering of trees and plants, and their powerful animation tools have been used in feature films such as Life of Pi and Tomorrowland. At SIGGRAPH 2015 we had a conversation with Michael Sechrest (Co-Founder of SpeedTree) and Kevin Meredith (Director of Business Development) about the inception SpeedTree, the best ways to sell middleware, and their favorite trees.

SpeedTree is the video game industry’s leading middleware solution for modeling and real time rendering of trees and plants, and their powerful animation tools have been used in feature films such as Life of Pi and Tomorrowland. At SIGGRAPH 2015 we had a conversation with Michael Sechrest (Co-Founder of SpeedTree) and Kevin Meredith (Director of Business Development) about the inception SpeedTree, the best ways to sell middleware, and their favorite trees.

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History of SpeedTree

Michael Sechrest: We were forced into it sort of. We started off doing defense contracting work, real-time 3D graphics for the Department of Defense. We’re located in Columbia, South Carolina. There’s not a whole lot you can do with real-time graphics there (I don’t mean to make it sound worse than it is), it’s not a technological hotspot like in LA, Vancouver, or Seattle.

We were doing projects for extra money: architectural rendering and golf course real-time applications. Trees were really difficult. We were real small, it was just me and my partner. We didn’t have the computing horsepower to render 5 or 10 million triangle trees, but we had customers who wanted that level of quality so we developed a hybrid solution that was 3D in places and 2D in places that was a lighter computational load for rendering.

Then we thought, if we need to do this for us, there’s others that need to do it. So we released a plugin for 3ds Max that we sold and it started growing a little bit. Then we made a push into games, we made some post cycle OpenGL.org. Nvidia called and they were launching a new shader program called CG, and they wanted to do a vegetation demo for that and we worked with them to get a big demo together. We started to get a lot of publicity from that and a lot of game developers started calling so we sort of turned it into a video game product.

We were still doing defense contracting and we were doing this too. Both sides were going alright, but eventually the tree stuff outpaced it and is much more exciting. It’s more gratifying to see your stuff in games and movies. Going to a theatre and seeing it on screen is rewarding. We made the decision to cut the defense contracting out and focus on SpeedTree sometime around 2010 or so. It was kind of a tough decision because we had defense contracting money and we could have kept that going but it was detracting from our SpeedTree efforts. I’m glad we did now, but it was a little gut wrenching when we did.

So yeah, we kind of fell into it, we didn’t start with this in mind. Our background was real-time 3D graphics. The three engineers all in the University of South Carolina got Masters Degrees in Computer Engineering and we all worked together on visualization projects. We did one for the Department of Energy and for the United States Navy. We were 3D graphics guys but we weren’t tree guys.

I think a lot of people come at 3D nature things for a biological or botanical perspective, but to us it’s still a technical challenge. There’s so much detail, there’s so many weird shapes, there’s no flat surfaces, it’s all organic, it’s hard to model, it’s complex, it’s hard to render, and it represents a technical challenge. That’s the part that our engineering team at least, is excited about. Wondering what they can do to solve a problem with technology and how they can do it. We’re not out there growing plants. We’re very cold and calculating engineers. That’s why we hired artists to be the touchy, feely, warm people to make beautiful things. You’re talking to an engineer, so it’s the technical challenge that is exciting.

SIGGRAPH Showcase

Michael Sechrest: Primarily we’re showing our modeling tool. We sell SpeedTree to visual effects artists, game developers, and just anybody putting trees in either a offline rendered environment or a real-time environment. We’re showing both of those here. This show is a little more VFX heavy so we’re doing a little less of our gaming stuff here, but our gaming product is a combination of tools, content, and middleware. So we have tools for artists used to make vegetation models. We have content models that we’ve made that we sell or package with it, and then we have an SDK that sits inside of a game engine and handles the task of rendering large amounts of trees – LED transitions, wind, and other things.

We’re selling our normal product. It’s not any bigger or smaller than it usually is. We’ve been going since 2002 and every year we make it a little bit better. We have to keep up with what the current consoles and PCs can do. We just meet the demands of our customers. As the technology grows, we have to grow with the rest of the industry.

AAA Games That Used SpeedTree

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Michael Sechrest: The ones that are out right now are Destiny and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Witcher 3 is one of the better examples. It’s got a very dynamic environment, so you walk through the wilderness and the trees are blowing in the wind, and the storm is coming so the wind blow harder and eventually it rains. It’s a very dynamic day/night cycle with the weather changing. That’s a very good example of a wide use of SpeedTree that uses a large percentage of our pipeline.

Arkham Knight is another successful example. There are fewer trees in there but you can knock those over. That’s an example of interacting with them in a way that you don’t really do in Witcher 3.

We’re also in Shadow of Mordor. They have one of the best new systems (nemesis system) where you meet one of the orc captains they remember who you are. It’s a dynamic system where it’s different for different people, and to me it’s groundbreaking. You lose in a fight and the orc that kills you becomes a captain, and then he remembers you the next time he sees you. We need to see more of that system. It was was more fun than the missions, the whole revenge idea. You’d be playing the game and you see the guy that killed you a while ago, and you stop what you’re doing just to get that guy.

Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5

Michael Sechrest: We have a subscription product for both of those. A lot developers in those engines are indie developers and there are AAA developers using those as well. We came out with a new product for Unreal Engine about a year ago and about 8 months ago for Unity 5. It’s a subscription version of our product where it’s $19/month.

The software runs for free out of the box in. So SpeedTree’s work in Unity and UE4. We sell our modeling tool for $19/month and you can make them yourself, or we also sell pre made models that we’ve done. So you can go to the Unity Asset Store and buy a White Oak, or you can come to our store and buy scotch pine for UE4 and they drop right in. It’s a much lower price point and most of the functionality of SpeedTree operates in those engines.

It’s sort of out of the box ready. You don’t have to go and integrate our SDK, we’ve already done that. Our wind shaders work, our LED system works, a lot of that stuff already works in those engines out of the box. It’s a pretty smooth transition from a SpeedTree model into being inside the game engine.

You can paint them on terrains, in both of them. It’s a pretty streamline pipeline as opposed to AAA making their own engines, they have to use the SDK and fit it into what they are doing and sometimes that’s a bigger process. UE4 is nice from that standpoint.

SpeedTree in Movies

Michael Sechrest: We made a pretty concerted effort. We started off in games, in 2002 we started selling game licenses. We did pretty well in games for a while but when all you make is digital trees, you better find everything that needs them because we already pigeonholed ourselves in a tight niche.

I guess it started at the 2008 SIGGRAPH. I went around and talked to visual effects studios and asked what they needed, and what problems they have with tree modeling. I told them there’s a lot of procedural modelers out there and we’re one as well, but what specifically were there problems. So I took their feedback, went back with the team and devised a solution that we thought was going to help and would be successful for the movie industry, but we had to up our game a bit because the detail in video game trees even today a 20,000 or 30,000 triangle tree would be sort of extreme in a game. For the visual effects in movies, there would be 5, 10, 15 million triangles so it’s a different sort of animal. We had to up the quality of our algorithm, which made our games modeling better and everything better. Then by random chance we got a phone call from ILM the summer we were working on this product. They said they heard we do trees, that they have tree problems, and they wanted to know if we had anything they could use.

We worked with ILM over the summer on what turned out to be Avatar which was our breakthrough movie, we didn’t even know that’s what it was. In a totally fortuitous and unrelated thing they were doing, they called us out of the blue, and we happened to be already working on something that might help. So we worked hand-in-hand with them over the summer to get the product good enough for them to use. Then we spent more time polishing it up and we released it and it’s just been going ever since. We were lucky that they called but we weren’t prepared for what we were doing otherwise. It was a little bit of luck and a little bit of preparation.

We’re also used in Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Mad Max: Fury Road. We’re in over 50 major solid releases such as Iron man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Star Trek Into Darkness. We’re doing well in superhero movies. We were also in The Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Gatsby. And then there is Birdman, which was the Oscar winner of the year. It was just one little scene where they were shooting some trees down, shooting the city.

Modeller Tool: How it Combines with the Generated Foliage and Artist’s Effort

Michael Sechrest: It’s a combination of procedural modeling. So rather than getting in and specifying every detail, you get a general sense of things. The trunk is this tall within this range, and the branching angles for the next level are within this range. You give it some guidelines and it generates the geometry.

All procedural algorithms are like that. It’s one way or another. We have our own particular one we like. The thing I think that sets us apart is the combination of that with the identity. You can go ahead and draw a branch if you need to. You click on a branch and move it, bend it around, delete it, without destroying the proceduralness of it. So you can focus on one part and still randomize the rest of it. It’s a combination of saving you time with procedural modeling techniques, but also giving you control for a specific shot.

So let’s say you had to have a branch draped across a path in a particular way. You can have a procedural tree, but most of the work is done by algorithm and then go in and fine tune the parts that are important to your shot or your world building. Let’s say you’re doing an entrance into a dungeon and you want trees to grow and form a door. You can have procedural modeling for the bulk of your work, but still get in there and hand-edit the parts that matter. That’s what our modeling tool is all about.

We have pricing from major visual effects studios and AAA game developers, all the way down to architectural rendering and indie game development. We have products at several different price points and the difference in them is which features are enabled and which ones aren’t.

Best Ways to Sell Middleware

Kevin MeredithConvince people we can solve their problem, in our case, letting them try it out for free. Then we actively support our evaluators just as we support our customers. If they have a problem we jump on it immediately and answer own phones as soon as somebody calls.

We try to understand what they’re trying to do. Sometimes people have a question that they’re just not finding the right feature. We can solve that through a support process and turn them into a licensee where they would have given up if we hadn’t been there.

Also, listening to people. It’s understanding what their requirements are and then if we can’t fulfill it immediately, we’ll figure out if we can add a feature to the next version.

It’s a personal process. Selling middleware is much more different than selling VFX tools. You can buy VFX tools from us like you buy Photoshop. You go online, you buy it, and you only talk to us if you have a problem. Middleware sales are more personal. You develop relationships. Kevin knows people at Activision, EA, and other places that he’s familiar with and has done business with for a long time.

You have a little bit more of a personal relationship at stake. You know the developers a little better. The pipeline integrations are a little deeper. So for middleware sales, it’s a lot more of a one on one interaction. You talk to them directly as opposed to community support or forum support for VFX tools.

Positive Changes in the Market

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Michael Sechrest: Every time they put out a new console, it can do more. It gives us an opportunity to do everything better. The movie industry is a little different in that the technological breakthroughs have sped up rendering times, but the product has looked great for years. Games are bridging that gap between what people have traditionally thought was game level graphics and movie level graphics, but there’s a long way to go to fill that in.

So the games market is dominated by what consoles can do. We’re pretty early into this new generation. The Xbox One, Wii U, and PlayStation 4 can all do things their predecessors couldn’t do. It gives us an opportunity to enhance what we do and what’s in our product. An example of that would be subsurface scattering modeling through the leaves. So if you’re on the ground looking up through the trees into the sun, it has a different lighting characteristic than if you have the sun behind you looking at the leaves.

The way the light bounces through the material and the flesh of leaves is different. Ten years ago you couldn’t do that, or it was really expensive and nobody would do it. Now you kind of have to do it. As the technology improves we get a chance to make everything more realistic. We try to get it up to that next level in graphics.

For us the most recent technological breakthrough is the release of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. They do significantly more than what the previous consoles did. They are going to run what gaming looks like for another 5 or 6 years probably. The longer they’re out, the better that people get with them. The PS4 games that are out right now, aren’t going to be as good as the ones coming out 2 years from now. Developers get more familiar with the hardware and do more with what they can do with it.

We saw it last with the early Xbox 360, which was doing no where near as good as the late Xbox 360 from a technological standpoint. So we’re early in this console generation and it’s exciting to see where we’re going to take it.

Favorite Tree

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Kevin Meredith: For me it’s the acacia. When the first trailers for Avatar came out and they showed the planet of Pandora, I believe it was a big acacia tree that just stood out there. That is our tree. It was about to be in this huge movie that was coming out in a couple of months. So that just kind of burned into my memory as my favorite tree.

Michael Sechrest: Mine is probably a banyan tree. That’s the one that has the aerial roots that come down from the branches into the ground. It’s got the crazy trunks that are really wide and gnarly. It grows and twists around each other. You’ll see them in Malaysia. The closest one I’ve seen in person was in Puerto Rico, but they are kind of a tropical environment thing. They are just crazy looking trees that present a big challenge from a modeling standpoint so I like those. They show up in a lot of tropicals, especially Asian tropicals.

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 Michael Sechrest, President & Co-Founder, SpeedTree

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Kevin Meredith, Director of Business Development, SpeedTree

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