Laubwerk History
The brainchild of landscape designer Philip Paar and software developer Timm Dapper, the seeds for Laubwerk were planted in 2005, when Philip and Timm met while both working as freelancers for 3D plant pinoneer Xfrog.
Timm was tasked with developing the first Xfrog plug-in for MAXON® CINEMA 4D® (Xfrog 4), while Philip handled business development and relations with two of Xfrog’s biggest clients, Nemetschek North America (Vectorworks CAD) and ChiefArchitect (Home Designer).
Both future Laubwerk founders soon recognized a significant gap in the 3D plant and tree models market—the need for greenery that was flexible to users needs, yet easy-to-use and simple to render.
This idea simmered for several years while Timm moved further into post-production and visual effects. As technical director, Timm has worked for commercial and movie post-production and vfx companies such as AixSponza, Locomotion Digital Facilities, Berliner Film Companie, Uncharted Territory and ScanlineVFX.
Philip, in the meantime, founded his first company, Lenné3D, which offered 3D landscape visualizations services as well as a line of real-time interactive landscape scenery software.
Laubwerk officially began on New Years Day 2010, with Philip and Timm joined by biologist Dr. Wieland Röhricht (whom Philip had worked with at ZALF Centre for Agriculture Landscape Research) and computer graphics scientist Jalda Schaback, a former colleague of Philips from the Dept. of Visualization and Data Analysis at the Zuse Institute Berlin.
That year, the core technology was developed under a business start-up grant ("EXIST") funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. In 2011, the fledgling start-up moved to the Business Innovation Centre at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences, where Jalda decided to leave Laubwerk to work at Berlin’s Wooga Interactive.
Laubwerk's innovative hybrid of procedural and hand-crafted 3D vegetation gives CG artists an unprecedented amount of control over botanically accurate 3D trees, while maintaining a fast workflow that minimizes the usual compromise between high-quality graphics and memory usage.
These innovations have earned the company funding from private investors and state grants, and have also garnered awards such as the 2nd Prize in the 2011 UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition 2011 and 1st Prize in the 2011 Freie Universität Business Plan Award.
In December of 2012, Laubwerk launched it's first commercially available product, Laubwerk Plants Kit 1, to excellent reviews from the 3D graphics community.
During this exciting time, Laubwerk also received funding in late 2012 from Frühphasenfonds Brandenburg (BFB), managed by investment experts bmp, assuring rapid expansion of their product line and increased international presence in 2013. This opportunity prompted the company to relocate out of its beloved Berlin to nearby Media City Babelsberg in Potsdam in early 2013, where they continue to develop innovative 3D plant model solutions.
In late 2012, Laubwerk launched their first commercially available product, “Plant Kit 1: Temperate Deciduous Trees” for Autodesk® 3ds Max® and MAXON® CINEMA 4D®, the first plug-in to offer such CG botany innovations such as render-ready, customizable plants, switch between seasons, and dynamic level-of-detail. The company is currently working on future Plant Kits, more features, as well as compatibility with more CG software platforms.