Brief History of Computer 3D Landscapes and 3D Nature
Originally formed in the late 1980s as a video production company, Questar Productions’s first product was an award-winning documentary on a controversial forestry project in the mountains of Colorado. Both during and after the creation of the documentary, founder Gary Huber foresaw the need to express hypothetical scenarios involving large areas of vegetated landscape to the general public, without relying on cumbersome and technical 2D maps. Seeing the potential of the advanced graphics capabilities in personal computers of the era, Gary began researching and developing software for his Amiga computer to combine 3D terrain data and landscape/vegetation information into a computer-generated synthetic 3D views complete with convincing color trees (conifer and deciduous) ground cover patterns, sky and haze.
Other software companies had produced similar software on the Amiga, including Virtual Reality Labs’ well known “Vista” (later, “VistaPro”) product (no relation to the Microsoft operating system of 2007) as well as Naturalgfx’s “Scenery Generator” (later, “Scenery Animator”) and a product known as “Panorama”. While these products all shared some common ground, and were inspired by earlier research into fractals, each brought its own unique capabilities to the art. All included a basic method of automated placement of one or more species of vegetation based on local terrain criteria, typically using elevation and slope. None of the commercial tools available could handle large, detailed regions, making them unusable for commercial and industrial terrain visualization. Gary saw a need for a more powerful and more flexible tool to produce television-quality 3D landscapes from real-world data, without compromising capability, quality, scale or accuracy.
In 1992, Gary began to develop algorithms and programs to fulfil the needs he foresaw. Originally written in an advanced BASIC language and later rewritten in C for speed, this research resulted in a set of related programs for assembling DEM, raster and vector data into databases, specifying 3D viewpoints, flight paths and landscape appearance and finally making photorealistic image output. The results from these tools were nothing short of revolutionary in the 3D Landscape industry, far surpassing existing tools in realism and flexibility. Originally conceived as in-house tools to support a service business, Gary realized that many users needed these tools for their own use, and began improving them into an end-user package.
“We have developed a system in which the important plant habitat variables, derived from digital elevation models, are embedded in a series of algorithms that predict what will grow at certain locations. All the user need do is supply a list of plant communities and some data about their habitat preferences. For lack of a better term, the word Ecosystem will be used to denote the members of this user-supplied list.”
-World Construction Set Operator’s Manual (for WCS 1.0, green book pictured above), Copyright 1993-1994 by Gary R. Huber
Ecosystems relied on what would later be referred to as “Rules of Nature™” and “Natural Intelligence™”. Specifically, WCS introduced Relative Elevation (terrain convexity/concavity) and Skew (directional-facing of sloped areas), new placement factors that greatly improved vegetation distribution realism over previous tools. Vegetation could also be placed by ColorMaps — raster images draped onto the terrain that matched specific colors to Ecosystems, allowing for specific coverage specification from GIS data and models, then unheard-of in 3D Landscape software. WCS was heralded as being the at “intersection of art and science”, coupling a high degree of realism (from the artistic film & video world where the Amiga excelled) and fluid animation of the viewpoint (and even vegetation attributes!) with the ability to show real-world places as easily as fantasy landscapes.
Also around 1996 another industry player, Animatek’s World Builder came on the scene, initially with a DOS version, but later for Windows as well. Bryce also appeared on Windows in 1997, making the environment for 3D landscapes very energetic and competitive.
With the new ESRI Shapefile support, GIS users began to combine the visualization power of WCS with the data processing capabilities of traditional GIS tools such as ESRI’s ArcView and ArcInfo to produce results never before seen in the industry. WCS 3 was also first ported to the Apple Power Macintosh.
In 1999, data guru Frank Weed joined the team, and in the spring we held our first training seminar.
In 2002 3D Nature unveiled WCS 6 with DEM Paint, a completely reworked renderer, true volumetric clouds, an expanded content library of pre-made components, Path/Vector transfer, Joystick Control, Realtime OpenGL foliage preview, better 3D object support, cleaner reflections, High Dynamic Range output, Post Processing and much more. WCS 6 also pioneered the SuperConductor render farm controller for managing large numbers of computers working on one or more projects.
2003 was a very exciting year, with January bringing us VNS 2 with all of WCS 6’s features plus powerful improvements like Image Management, Scenarios, Templates, Thematic Maps, DEM Merging and Splined Terraffectors. Spring heralded the massive Ultimate Earth dataset for creating fast and easy renderings of the entire planet earth (see: “Earth From Space”), as well as a massive Colorado snowstorm that collapsed part of the roof in 3D Nature’s shipping area. Undaunted, we unveiled to the world the innovative Scene Express add-on and NatureView Express realtime Viewer for WCS and VNS, bringing a complete GIS-based authoring system for high-detail, realistic 3D landscapes in interactive real-time. Capping off the year’s achievements, SRTMFill appeared on Christmas Eve to bulk up the stockings of people everywhere using the popular new global SRTM DEM data.
In 2004, we turned to the needs of heavy-duty forestry visualization customers with the VNS Forestry Edition and Forestry Wizard, an add-on for streamlining the visualization of GIS forestry attributes and turning them into accurate vegetation stand visualizations. New add-ons for Scene Express provided support for the OpenFlight (FLT) and rapid prototyping STL and VRML-for-STL file formats.
In 2005 we introduced the 3D Nature Foliage Library Components for SketchUp, bringing the vast 3D Nature foliage library to SketchUp users in the form of ready-to-use foliage SketchUp components. All the while, we worked quietly working on the sequel to Scene Express, version 2 of which showed up in January of 2006, bringing export support for FBX, GIS and VNS output along with a more powerful NatureView Express.
With the growing popularity of Virtual Globe tools like Google Earth and NASA’s WorldWind, it was an obvious opportunity to bring the power of WCS/VNS and Scene Express to this fast-growing trend. In April 2006 3D Nature introduced a free Google Earth KML exporter update for Scene Express 2, followed by a WorldWind exporter. In September, the Scene Express was updated again, becoming the first GIS-based tool to support Google Earth 4’s COLLADA textured 3D models and properly-sized crossboard trees.
In the fall of 2015, AlphaPixel LLC purchased the assets of 3D Nature to continue supporting Visual Nature Studio and its users.
