RPC People... again.

[tonymacdonald]

I have been reading some posts relating to RPC people and Vray. OK I know RPC people can look extremely fake and flat but is there anything else to use? that look better. Im not to concerned if the people look a bit fake/ flat, I just need alot of them in a large polygon scence to give a sence of scale and to add a bit of relism to the scence.

My main concern is, how stable is RPC with the current Vray build? Are there many of you out there that are succesfully using RPC people in your scences?

Before I get the company to spend MORE money i'd appreciate any feedback you have to offer.

I need to produce a large amount stills and Quicktime VR's so I dont want to composite them in Photoshop afterwards.

Thanks again
Tony MacDonald

[losbellos]

Hmm, I've used them few months ago. If you want shadows on them. Decrease the self illumination value of the RPC obj. , also if use it in GI enviromant, you'll have to turn off cast reflection, If I remember correctly.
Otherwise you'll get some intresting aura around it. However RPC's will pop up on reflective objects...
So thats it what I know.

[Yadla]

What are "RPC" people ??

[Kerbox]

After what I understand, they are basicly bitmaps of people mapped to planes.

[metroberlin]

for me the only true way to use rpc (when it´s not for an animation) is in photoshop. the photoshop plugin for rpc ist pretty cool.

[shytigercp]

re

I haven't had too much trouble with them. This one was done a little while ago. The trouble I had was when I was rendering w/ GI. I had to turn the GI off to avoid trouble and put extra filler lights in. When I don't overload a scene with rpc's everything runs smooth, even w/ GI on. Sometimes crashing can occur because of one of the rpc files that you're using (even with the default scanline renderer). I haven't had time to go through every single one of them yet. Maybe in the future there can be some kind of collaboration between chaos and archvision.

ST

[davexl23]

Amazed by your image!

We use RPC, and I have had so many problems with RPC and VRAY (rendering glitches, with slices of the image inverted - really wacky) that I render in scanline and composite later in Digital Fusion.

But what amazes me is how you can render an image with thousands of RPCs - for me it is the most appallingly slow performance - considering it is loading sprites - that even 50 to 100 characters result in minute plus load times per frame. What were the times to load a few thousand RPCs?

It used to be acceptable in the early days, but each new version just gets slower and slower, to the point that for my favourite style of people in architectural renders – blurred ghostly people – it is faster to render 3D meshes.

[shytigercp]

re

davexl23...
That image took around 5 minutes + or - to load all the rpcs. For this paticular project I copied the rpcs being used in the scene to my local machine(I use a scsi raid drive). I'm using and older version of the rpc plugin. I agree w/ you, the loading times are ridiculous. In the past for I've used forest pro for crowds (just w/ stills though). I've taken the time to render single rpcs ,split the alpha channels, and assign the materials to the forest planes for huge crowds. This method seems to be more time efficient.

[R2J2]

I've found that you need to takeoff reflection under the rpc mass edit, if it's on under object properties then they still reflect, after that I had a single machine over the network that would render them wrong. just my experiance. +I moved the maps over to each machine, don't know if that helps.