ALL SCI-FI

[bulldogtrekker]

Computer Graphics Company Earns Academy Award for Technical Achievement
By Rodney Welch, Free-Times.com



The next time you're watching a Hollywood blockbuster and you see incredibly lifelike trees sprouting up, changing color or shaking in the wind amid an imaginary landscape, there's a chance a little company in Lexington SC is responsible.

The company is called Interactive Data Visualization, Inc., and it's the computer graphics firm behind SpeedTree, a software tool used to create 3-D animated plants and trees for computer games, movies, architects, the military, the Secret Service — and just about any client who needs convincing foliage in their shots or video renderings.

If you've seen Avatar, Life of Pi, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Lone Ranger or Jack the Giant Slayer — or played such games such as Destiny, Far Cry 4 or Assassin's Creed: Unity, among dozens of others — you've seen their technological process in action.

Next month, the company will receive the highest honor Hollywood can bestow on makers of game-changing technology: a Scientific and Technical Academy Award.

The company emerged from the University of South Carolina/Columbia Technology Incubator in 1999, the brainchild of computer engineering graduates Michael Sechrest and Chris King.

For the first few years, IDV was devoted largely to creating scientific visualization for the U.S. Navy. The prospects for the company began to change when they took on a side project: an architectural rendering for the CanalSide development on Huger Street.

The client wanted very specific renderings of the trees, which created a challenge. They could use photographic rendering, which would look cheap, or 3-D modeling, which was cost-prohibitive.

Instead, Sechrest and King came up with a hybrid: better than pictures, but not quite 3-D.

It was then that Sechrest and King considered that maybe there were other uses for this kind of technology. Although scientific visualization remained IDV's bread and butter, the company went after the booming video game market — and soon began booming right along with it.

It wasn't easy at first. Gaming companies and major Hollywood studios were leery about putting trust in a little South Carolina company they'd never heard of.

"One of the early challenges for us was to establish any kind of credibility whatsoever," Sechrest says. 'So actually being used in films and video games, and getting awards like this, help break through that barrier. And I expect this will be the thing that breaks through more than anything else."

What started out as a basic visual idea grew increasingly more sophisticated and detailed. They attended professional conferences, found out what kind of "vegetative modeling solution" developers wanted to see — and started over from scratch with a more advanced 3-D model.

Before the new version was even released, they got a call from George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic (now owned by Disney). The folks at ILM needed vegetation shots for a new movie — which turned out to be James Cameron's Avatar.

"In the past, we had never been able to control down to a leaf or twig, where with SpeedTree we could," says Richard Bluff of ILM in a testimonial on the SpeedTree website.

According to the Academy's official release, SpeedTree "substantially improves an artist's ability to create specifically designed trees and vegetation by combining a procedural building process with the flexibility of intuitive, direct manipulation of every detail.'

Although the SpeedTree team was also directly involved in providing animated growth for the recent Noah, the company isn't usually hands-on with movies in production. Instead, their primary focus is constantly upgrading the SpeedTree software. That's why Sechrest and company don't receive screen credit — and why the Academy Award is important.

Getting the award meant undergoing the Academy's rigorous, months-long investigation process, which included making a personal presentation in Hollywood. Waiting to hear the result was nerve-wracking, Sechrest says, but it paid off.

Sechrest, King and Senior Software Architect Greg Croft will each receive awards. They and other IDV team members will all be heading to Hollywood for the annual black-tie Sci-Tech Awards on Feb. 7.

"It's kind of a once-in-a-lifetime event," says Sechrest, "so we're making as big a deal of it as we can."

LINK:
http://www.free-times.com/arts/local-computer-graphics-company-earns-academy-award-for-technical-ac-012115

[Bud Brewster]

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If I die tomorrow and I'm reincarnated, I hope I come back as a pimple-faced nerd who's a whiz at CGI. I think I'd be good at it!

Great post, BDT. A very interesting article.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Robert (Butch) Day]

A great use for this would be non-Terrestrial flora!
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Common Sense ISN'T Common

[Bud Brewster]