COLUMBIA, SC — Jack the Giant Slayer, the fantasy/adventure film rebirth of the “beanstalk” folktale, includes a climactic battle scene that features giants hurling flaming trees created with SpeedTree Cinema 3D plant/tree animation tools.
Toronto-based visual effects studio Soho VFX selected SpeedTree Cinema tools for a key scene in the Bryan Singer-directed film, where angry giants attack a castle using uprooted trees as flaming projectiles. SpeedTree was also used to create a digital forest with millions of trees, including ground-level vegetation and plant life.
"SpeedTree's high- and low-polygonal tree models were essential for rendering such an enormous number of trees," noted Berj Bannayan, co-founder and visual effects supervisor at Soho VFX. "The procedural nature of tree creation really made the process simple. Once you get a tree looking the way you want, SpeedTree allows you to easily generate many different variations with its optimization and culling tools. This saved us a huge amount of time in the creation of our forest."