mhinks Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 Hi all Im putting together a quote for a developer who has asked us to visualise a new marina development in the UK. Im looking at getting OS or other sourced laser land survey data for the terrain, and then model from the architechs drawings the new buildings and surrounding areas features. They are looking at getting an animation, couple of minutes, coming in to the development from the main road so the locals can see how the marina will effect the current views. I was wondering if anyone can recommend a company for the land survey data, and whether I should go for RPC cars, trees for low poly ones? I have euro trees library already. Any other helpfull tips would be greatfully recieved. Kind regards Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
colorID Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 hello, we are working on huge scale projects and always faced a problem concdering the landscape elements.. especially the trees. one important advice NEVER use the rpcs for massive coverge. since the rpc trees are non instances ur processor and ram will die for that. we are currently using maps and crossed plans for the trees. best regards M.anani Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhinks Posted November 3, 2004 Author Share Posted November 3, 2004 Hi Yeah I discovered RPC's tend to be good only when used sparingly. Very memory and cpu intensive. I came across a plugin called bionatsFX which looks good, but is a further cost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quizzy Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 well, to disagree on this one: I disagree. RPC's are the most efficient way to put a lot of trees in your scene cause they are only about 2 faces per tree. The preperation of the RPC's take some time, but the render below rendered in 1 minute 50 seconds on a P4 3,06Ghz (HT disabled) the scene has 800 RPC's in it and are all different. So each of them has a different texture applied to it. Try 800 trees with bionatics or any other solution and your rendering time will be a lot more. The disadvantage of the RPC are that they are made for eyelevel viewing. You can do birdseye view but to a certain height as you can see in the rendering... I could propably get the rendering time down to about 1 minute when I do some optimazation of the RPC content. Do a random billboard, turning of jitter, applying same materials to some of the RPC's etc..... [edit] ow, memory usage was 300/500MB [edit] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 I would second the use of RPC's as the way to go for an animation. It does use quite a bit of ram but as long as you don't run out it shouldn't affect your render times too much, nothing like natFX or actual models of trees anyway, and the RPC's will probably look better than models (low poly ones anyway) as well. I've seen criss cross trees look OK for animations but only at a distance. I think it would be a tall order to get them to look very good at all in foregrounds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vince Paske Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 I ran across a problem during network rendering an animation with hundreds of trees where the server with all the RPC's just died trying to feed the information to all the computers I had strung together (25 or 30). It was fine with up to 10 machines, but after that the renderings that used to take 2 minutes were jumping to 45 mins. to an hour. Because these were other people's workstations (with limited drive space) I couldn't just dump the RPC's locally for the slaves to render. It might be an option for you though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhinks Posted November 4, 2004 Author Share Posted November 4, 2004 Thanks for the replies, all of which are very helpfull. I think Ill stick with RPC for now, and maybe as you said Calvino, keep a set of the RPC's on the local machines. Although, how would I go about this? Do I put a set on each machine, then when putting them in to the scene, load them from the local drive, then the servers will also look to the same local dir for them? So the important thing is to put the RPC Dir in he same place on all machines? Im still stuck for land survey data. Anyone from the UK got any ideas? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted November 4, 2004 Share Posted November 4, 2004 You don't have to put the rpc's in the same path on all your local machines, you just have to set the "external files" in max on each machine to point to where the rpc content is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wireframe studio Posted November 5, 2004 Share Posted November 5, 2004 Iv'e used a survey company based Nottingham way called Survey 3. Always been impressed with quality of survey, helpfulness of the guys there and a quick turnaround of data. http://www.survey3.co.uk. Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhinks Posted November 5, 2004 Author Share Posted November 5, 2004 Cool, Ill check them out now. Thanks Doh, their site us not working, ill have to try again later. Has anyone used geosense.co.uk? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wireframe studio Posted November 5, 2004 Share Posted November 5, 2004 Just been on Survey 3's site - working ok now - can call them on +44 (0) 115 922 2469. Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pierre Posted November 8, 2004 Share Posted November 8, 2004 Hi Guys, Just to add on what's been said on the landscaping and vegetation issues, I've used Bionatics (easynat first and then natfx) and really thought it was much better then RPC because it did all that Rpc did (cross or single billboards) but also higher polys like 250 faces in hybrid. Both the Hybrid and 2D billboard can be instanced .. since they were geometry I didn't care which angle it worked every time. I was using RPC before and it did ok for a just a couple of trees but for massive ones.. ouch ... For a quick comparison I'd say try both the rpc demo and the easynat that comes free with max. Attached are results with easynat Pierre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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