SpeedTree 3 is a powerful plug-in for creating low to medium polygon count trees. In most other tree plug-ins, trees start at about 10,000 polygons and go up. The average SpeedTree tree has around 5,000 polygons. As such, you can create a lot more speedtree trees in your scene. In addition, SpeedTree 3 also fully supports wind animation within the tree for a highly realistic look in your animations.

SpeedTreeCAD Lite

SpeedTree3 comes in two parts. The first part is SpeedTreeCAD Lite. This is a standalone tree editing program. To create a new tree, all you need is a photograph of the bark you want to use and a photograph of the leaves. The rest you can do inside SpeedTreeCAD.

SpeedTreeCAD works in OpenGL, so you must have a reasonable OpenGL card on your system (Geforce 2 or better in most cases) for it to run properly. Once you have SpeedTreeCAD up and running you can start defining your trees starting with basic properties such as the trunk width, overall height, etc. Then you add as many levels of branches as needed for the tree type you are working with. Then you can add in the leaf level details by defining the leaf sizes and number of leaves on each branch.

Each tree that is created is also assigned a random seed number. This enables you to create unlimited numbers of trees based off the same definition, but look slighlty different. In addition, you can also define how the tree reacts to wind in SpeedTreeCAD Lite. You can define the overall effect of the wind and even see it in real time in the viewport. The viewport displays also support basic lighting effects as well.

One of the new features in SpeedTreeCAD and SpeedTree 3 is that it now fully supports the creation of palm tree types of trees through the use of Fronds. Fronds are a special leaf type that simulate palm tree type leaves. As it turns out, fronds are flexible enough, you can also use them to simulate sets of branches on your trees as well, allowing you to reduce the amount of geometry in your scene even further.

Overall, SpeedTreeCAD Lite is a powerful tool for modeling trees to work in 3ds max.

SpeedTree MAX 3 Plugin

Trees that you create in SpeedTreeCAD Lite can be saved out as an SPT file. In other words, a tree definition file. This is where the second part of SpeedTree 3 comes into play: The SpeedTree MAX 3 plugin. This plugin, which works in 3ds max 4.x through 7.x currently, allows you to import the SPT files into 3ds max and place the trees into your scene. It also acts as a data pipeline between 3ds max and Speedtree, enabling you to edit exiting tree definitions in your scene. You can do this by selecting the tree and telling SpeedTree you want to edit the tree in SpeedTreeCAD Lite.

As you can see in the figure on the left, the 3ds max plugin for SpeedTree is not overly complicated. It provides you with many controls that you also have in SpeedTreeCAD Lite. You start out by creating a generic tree, then importing your tree definition through the Import ".spt" file button. You will also notice the seed buttons along with Randomize and compute. These enable you to quickly create many variations of your tree, even though you are using the same tree definition

The SpeedTree plug-in also enables you to define the overall size of the tree, apply wind using standard 3ds max wind space warps, and also control the overall display of the trees. In some cases you may want to see the full detail of the tree in the viewports, in others, only minimal amounts of detail. Wind has been updated in SpeedTree 3 to provide a new tool called SpeedWind that provides fine control over how wind affects your trees.

There are also controls to allow you to edit just the selected tree, all trees in the scene, or only those visible in the scene at the current time. So, if you need to change the tree type from a pine tree to an oak tree, you can do so quickly and easily.

SpeedShadows

Because SpeedTree is partly based off of billboard technology (images mapped to a flat plane with opacity) rendering shadows can be slow. SpeedTree gets around this by providing you with it’s own shadow generator plug-in called SpeedShadow. This gives you the detail you need in the shadows, but with the rendering speed of shadow maps.

The Controls for SpeedShadow are similar to a regular shadow map, but also include options for defining the number of leaves in your trees that will actually cast shadows. In addition, SpeedTree also works great with most rendering engines such as VRay where you can use raytraced shadows and still get good render times.

SpeedForest

Of course, no tree plugin is complete without the ability to create a forest. In SpeedTree 3, there is a SpeedForest plugin that is implemented as a utility. Through this utility, you can create your forests and define boundaries for those forests. Best of all, you are not limited to just using Speedtree trees. You can use just about any object with it. New to SpeedTree 3, the SpeedForest tool now supports creating copies, instances, and references of objects.

SpeedForests are based off of a couple of pieces of information. First, you need a ground plane to place the forest on. SpeedForest will automatically place the trees on the ground plane object using the pivot point of the trees to "plant" them. The ground plane must be any mesh or patch object that supports intersect ray. So, in general, you create your ground plane, apply materials etc. Then, create a copy of it and collapse it to an editable mesh and use the collapsed copy to plant your trees. Once your are finished, delete the collapsed copy.

The second piece of information that is needed is the boundary locations of your forest. SpeedForest enables you to define this with a spline. So, you simply draw a spline (open or closed) above your ground plane to define the overall area in which the trees will appear. The spline generally needs to exist above the ground plane to work best.

Once you have those two pieces of information setup, you can simply select one or more objects, trees, etc, the ground plane, and the boundary lines to create the forest. SpeedForest then enables you to define the number of trees to create, a collision radius so trees are not placed too close to each other, and finally a set of transform controls so your new trees can be placed with random variations in X,Y, and Z position, rotation, and scale. The random variations enable you to quickly create a realistic looking forest where trees are not all the same size and orientation.

Best of all, SpeedForest creates the new forest where each tree is an instanced object. Upon completion, it dumps all the trees in the forest into a named selection set for ease of use. Through the instancing, if you have an advanced renderer that has good support for instanced object rendering, you can pretty much render as many trees as you want. To illustrate this, take a look at the screenshot below. This is a scene in 3ds max 5 with over 3500 trees. In VRay, it renders in about 200 MB of RAM. 3ds max itself also has good instancing support, so you can handle many trees inside of 3ds max without an advanced rendering engine as well.

All this comes in one great package complete with tutorial videos on how to use the system. Overall, if you need to have very good looking trees in your scene, SpeedTree 3is very hard to beat. It provides you with the ability to create your own trees, add wind animation, create forests, and render huge numbers of trees with relative ease. So, if you’re convinced, go ahead and add it to your cart. If not, click on the Demos link at the top and take SpeedTree 3 for a test drive for 15 days and see how you like it!

SpeedTree also ships with a library of trees to get you started. This library includes over 30 species in various resolutions including the following:

Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea Pungens Glauca)
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga Menziesii)
Scotch Pine (Pinus Sylvestris)
American Holly (Ilex Opaca)
Amur Cork (Phellodendron Amurense)
Black Gum (Nyssa Sylvatica)
Bradford Callery Pear (Pyrus Calleryana)
Common Hook Thorn (Acacia Caffra)
Crepe Myrtle (Lagerstoemia Indica)
English Oak (Quercus Robur)
Ficus (Ficus Benjamina)
Honey Locust (Gleditsia Triacanthos)
Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana)
Peach (Prunus Persica)
Shingle Oak (Quercus Imbricaria)
Sourwood (Oxydendrum Arboreum)
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora)
Sugar Maple (Acer Saccarum)
Tulip (Liriodendron Tulipifera)
Weeping Willow (Salix Babylonica)
Willow Oak (Quercus Phellos)
Coconut Palm (Cocos Nucifera)
Curly Palm (Howea belmoreana)
Palmetto (Sabal Palmetto)
American Boxwood (Buxus Sempervirens)
Azalea (Rhododendron)
Carolina Buckthorn (Frangula Caroliniana)
Extra Terrestrial
Halloween
Saguaro Cactus (Carnegiea Gigantica)
Weeds


Features:

Design and edit trees using SpeedTree CAD.
Low polygon count for low system overhead and fast rendering.
Foresting tools for placing any number of trees at a time.
Library of over 30 different trees and shrubs.
Supports wind for animations.
Computes random trees based on type.
Randomizer based on controllable seed value.
Excellent for architectural visualization and landscaping.
Support for palm tree species.
Improved Foresting with instances.