“It's a misconception that Speedtree generates these procedural trees on the fly, when in fact, it is an offline procedural tool. And you keep hitting randomize and it’ll keep hitting these different random variation, so you can populate a unique forest with trees very quickly.”īut it’s important to clear up a common fallacy, he says. “But once you get a definition, you can just hit randomize, one button, and it’ll make a tree that looks similar to the last, but not exactly like it. “It’s all procedural, meaning we use curves and numbers to input into an algorithm that will generate this tree, and as you change those curves and numbers so changes the tree,” King tells me. I get the impression the trees are in kind hands.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE ELDER SCROLLS GAMES TAKE PLACE FULL
He’s a bright, generous character, the kind of person that blends a simple answer into an extended anecdote before coming full circle into a question about me. Beyond the time and energy saved making so many trees, SpeedTree’s vegetation is also designed to conserve as many system resources as possible.įor a simple understanding of how it works, the story of their success, and where SpeedTree is being used today, I talked to King over the phone and through a few scattered email exchanges. SpeedTree’s tools also include massive libraries of textures for rendering vegetation, and animation tools that simulate wind moving through branches and leaves.
It’s easier to think of SpeedTree as more of a specialized tree canvas, a tool used to generate whole forests of trees that look similar but aren’t carbon copies of one another. That doesn’t mean SpeedTree is as simple as a copy and paste engine, or that it spits out photorealistic trees within perfectly simulated ecosystems. SpeedTree is a middleware solution for videogame developers and, more recently, filmmakers who need to make realistic trees en masse, quickly. Howard just gave a small company a big job that helped it keep pace in an industry overgrown with new possibilities. But Todd Howard didn’t make the trees or the alleged pubes or the technology behind them.
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