Academy Award for trees grew from humble roots in Columbia

Many of the spectacular trees on Pandora in the movie “Avatar” grew from a metaphoric acorn dropped from a laurel oak at the corner of Washington and Sumter in Columbia.

The local guys behind those trees, now working in a small office above a bank on Lexington’s Sunset Boulevard, recently won an Academy Award for their technological savvy.

In Hollywood, where fake trees have more value than real ones, Lexington-based Interactive Data Visualization and its SpeedTree Cinema software is a big deal … even if the people behind the software don’t act the part.

Chris King, Michael Sechrest and Greg Croft wear jeans to work. They speak of their success with a blend of aw-shucks pride, nerd-speak amazement and enough business savvy to make it all work.

“It just seems like a ridiculous thing to build a company on,” says Sechrest, 42, “but apparently it’s not.”

King, 44, used to be a bit sheepish when people asked what he did for a living.

“I say I do fake trees for video games and movies and they all just think it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world,” King says. “It’s like it never really registered with them until the Academy Award was announced. ‘You mean you actually do these for movies I’ve seen?’ I don’t feel quite as silly now telling people what I do as I have for the past 15 years.”

That might be the second best thing about winning an Academy Award. The first is the validation SpeedTree’s founders felt when they got word they had been selected. They had sent in the nomination themselves – that’s the first step for the technological awards. But the only way they could take the next step in the process was for visual effects directors and artists to explain to the awards committee what the tree software meant to their work.

SpeedTree is like Photoshop for vegetation. The library has 180 species of trees at different detail levels in different seasons, all designed for lifelike moves in the wind or during rapid growth. Movie studios buy the package off the shelf for $4,995. Artists export a basic tree, then manipulate it to their needs using a few mouse clicks. They can create a forest – even one with oak leaves on a cedar tree – in a tiny fraction of the time once required.

Special effects directors sent the Academy Awards committee rave reviews and clips from movies the SpeedTree guys didn’t even know had used their software – “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Iron Man 3,” “Jack the Giant Slayer,” “Life of Pi,” “Super 8.”

“They really went to bat for us,” Sechrest says.

The finalists for their category included industry giants such as George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, Disney’s DreamWorks and Weta Digital, the visual effects company for the “Lord of the Rings” movies. Multiple winners are allowed in the technical awards, and SpeedTree and DreamWorks were the two to earn the award.

SpeedTree “gives the exact tool that an artist needs to craft anything an artist’s mind can come up with,” said Richard Bluff, a visual effects supervisor with Industrial Light & Magic.

On “Avatar,” for instance, director James Cameron expressed a very specific look for the trees. It’s not botanically like any tree on Earth. Other tree software at the time limited the adaptations to botanically accurate trees. SpeedTree gave more freedom “to draw a branch the way you wanted,” Bluff said.

Growth from a humble start

The aforementioned laurel oak at the corner of Washington and Sumter streets was just outside the University of South Carolina incubator office where Interactive Data Visualization got its start in 2000. King and Sechrest were USC computer engineering graduates trying to come up with a way to make a living converting data into 3-D graphics.

They worked on architectural renderings and on military projects that were as much about service to the customer as the computer programming work itself. When the Boudreaux Group asked them to put together a presentation on the company’s plans for the Canalside project in Columbia, the giant blueprint for the project had a bunch of buildings. Sechrest noticed squiggly lines with the words “mesquite trees.” He must have gulped, because the architect asked if 3-D trees would be a problem.

“I said ‘No, of course not,’” Sechrest says. “I’m in say-anything-you-need-to-get-the-job mode. The rest of the meeting I was thinking, ‘We can’t do the trees.’”

In 3-D graphics, everything is built on triangles pieced together. Buildings, with all of their straight lines, are easy. A flat wall can be built with just two triangles. But trees are bendy and gnarly, and they can have thousands of leaves with distinct shapes. That means tens of thousands of triangles in a simple tree.

Working overtime on a tight schedule with limited computer resources, they came up with a hybrid solution that created trees with decent branch structure and leaves that changed shape as the vantage point of the camera moved. It was rudimentary, but it worked.

After the presentation, they realized there must be others who could use their solution.

They went out and examined trees, including the laurel oak outside their office and many of the trees on the State House grounds. Admittedly not artists themselves, their early efforts were weak, especially Sechrest’s first tree.

“It was gawdawful,” he says. “(Chris’ wife asked), ‘So this tool makes dead trees?’”

But they tweaked the art, eventually bringing in their own artists, and began selling the software as a plug-in for a program called 3D Studio Maps.

Video game artists quickly found it. Trees in video games at that point were less than aesthetically pleasing and had too much sameness. The trees created through SpeedTree not only looked better, but the basic trees could be easily manipulated to create a forest of distinct trees.

The SpeedTree creators got a kick out of its use in video games. They all grew up playing those sorts of games, King in the Lexington area, Sechrest in Irmo and Croft in Greenwood. They used the early game consoles, and Sechrest recalls spending hours playing games in the Barrel of Monkeys arcade at Dutch Square Mall.

So they were floored when the computer video graphics card giant Nvidia contacted them and asked to use the tree software to promote a new technological product. They made a demo for the project.

“We put it on our server that we were sharing with six or seven other incubator companies at the time,” King says. “Nvidia put out a story about it and linked to our server, and it all went live. And our server immediately burned to the ground.”

Nvidia had to move the demo to its website to handle the 30,000 downloads from video game designers.

Betting the house on trees

As more video game artists bought their software, they decided in 2008 to make SpeedTree their main focus and to branch out into movies.

“You better find anybody that’s willing to spend a nickel on trees and have something to sell them,” Sechrest says. “We were doing really well on games but had no presence in film visual effects.”

They went to a major conference where movie visual effects artists gathered and asked how they could adapt SpeedTree Studio for movie use. They got plenty of suggestions and positive feedback, and they spent the next year working on a new product, SpeedTree Cinema.

“We had only three engineers doing the work, working ridiculous hours,” King says.

As they were getting to the point where the software seemed to be working, they got a stunning call from Industrial Light & Magic.

“If this was a movie, this is where the needle scratches across the record and everything stops,” King says. “This is the biggest visual effects company in the world. They say, ‘We hear you guys do trees. We’re doing this movie, and we want to look at what you got.’”

King explained to them they weren’t sure how well this new product would hold up. It was still in the developmental stage and crashed often in their test runs.

“They said, ‘We live on the bleeding edge; give us the new stuff, that’s where we live,’” King recalls.

The new product worked extremely well, and it was on the highest of levels. Industrial Light & Magic had been brought in to help Weta Digital on an overwhelming project that turned out to be “Avatar.” The portion done by Industrial Light & Magic involved much of the forest on the imaginary moon of Pandora, and those trees grew from SpeedTree Cinema.

“Late in 2009, we got a phone call from them,” King says. “‘A trailer was released today for a movie that may or may not have your trees in it,’ and then they just hung up.

“We rushed to the computer to play trailers released that day. The first shot in the trailer (for “Avatar”) was the scene over the jungle. One of our artists said, ‘That’s my tree right there in the middle.’

“As first films go, we could have done a lot worse.”

But then SpeedTree Cinema wasn’t used in a single film the next year, and they wondered if they were one-hit wonders. But “Avatar” proved to be a great advertisement, and the delayed impact started to hit in 2012. By 2015, the software had been used in at least 44 movies, probably twice that many. It’s hard to get an accurate count because special effects artists buy the software and can use it on any project.

Going Hollywood without moving to Hollywood

All of those trees in those movies get their start in a nondescript office above a bank in Lexington. There’s no sign touting the company outside the building.

“We don’t need foot traffic,” said Croft, 36, who took a USC class taught by King and joined the SpeedTree team early in the development. “We get most of our customers online.”

They travel to major special effects gatherings to gather feedback and pitch their products, but they can do most of their work right here.

“Software you can really write anywhere,” Croft said. “You don’t have to be in a giant building. We all live here. We all have kids. We’re not itching to get out of here. We’re doing fine right where we are.”

The company now has nine employees, an all-time high. Many of the employees start as interns brought in from the University of South Carolina, where their mentor, Roger Dougal, is still guiding future computer engineers.

King, Sechrest and Croft might prefer living in South Carolina, but they did enjoy the Hollywood trappings of the Academy Awards. The nerve-wracking part was when they flew out to California to make the initial presentation to the committee. After several months of silence, they learned in January they had been selected. Then the fun began.

Accompanied by family members, they accepted their honor at the Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills Feb. 7. When hosts Margot Robbie of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Miles Teller of “The Spectacular Now” announced their selection, King, Sechrest and Croft strolled to the podium and thanked the Academy, their team at SpeedTree and their families.

And they made clear their South Carolina roots when Sechrest gave credit to “USC, that’s Gamecocks, not Trojans.”

This story was originally published March 21, 2015 at 8:48 PM with the headline "Academy Award for trees grew from humble roots in Columbia."