In Clarisse, SpeedTree Engine converts small procedural definitions to 3D geometry. The tradeoff for lower disk space and greatly increased flexibility is the increased CPU time needed to generate the geometry from the procedural definition. Generally, the more complex the model, the more CPU cycles it'll take to generate. SpeedTree Engine uses all available CPU cores during computation, or at least those allocated to Clarisse.

The resolution setting mirrors the resolution option in SpeedTree Cinema. Using lower resolutions can be useful for rapid prototyping. “Icon” and “Spike” modes have been added to the Clarisse integration for very simple representations. Their height can be set via a plugin attribute.

It is possible to randomize a tree model from within Clarisse. The “Seed” attribute defaults to zero, which causes SpeedTree to load the model as it was defined in Cinema. If a different seed is used (restricted to positive numbers), alternate geometry will be generated. Changing this seed to a random value has the same effect as pushing the global “Randomize” button in Cinema, highlighted below.

The picture below shows the same STE file loaded in Clarisse, each with a different seed value. Each time a copy uses a different seed, more memory will be required.