Tim Nelson Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 In theory, RPC's can be a great tool. Unfortunately, most of you realize that they cannot be used very well in most GI renderers and seem to be centered around the old scanline technology. Now, I am coming from a Vray background so there may be some renderers that can more easily work with RPC besides scanline, but I am unaware of those. But whats amazing to me, is that Archvision has not presented new technology to address this problem that has existed for the past several years, and as far as I know have not even acknowledged that there is a need for improvement in their product. And what is ironic, is that VisMasters, who in a large part, is owned by, or affiliated with Archvision, has not once featured an "image of the week" that makes use of RPC technology. Clearly there is something wrong with that, and speaks volumes about the quality and usablity of RPC content. I have used RPC in the past, and want to like them now, but as you see so often in comments from others, you just don't use RPC's if you want a good looking rendering. So, this topic is out there for anybody, but I would like to hear Jeff's thoughts especially since I know he can get answers from the top. Is it just not possible to make RPC more GI friendly, or has it just not been seen as critical enough to make an effort on? I still think RPC can have a great future, but only if major changes are in the works. And I am all for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ecastillor Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 couldnt agree more.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paulcalif Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 RPC's are overpriced 90's tech. The content is fairly strong, but the technology behind it has never been that great, and it's only gettting worse with age as new lighting and rendering techniques emerge. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 i agree. the problem that i wind up facing is that people not doing viz just want to see people in their illustrations. i am not sure if they don't care that they wind up looking like a photomontage, or they just are not aware that they look like a photomontage. ....placing people in renderings succesfully is one of the more difficult aspects of this field. i have seen very few that are truely succesful. ...by succesful i mean you are not looking at the person, thinking they look strange in the image. i have no idea about the logistics behind RPC, as far as what they are doing to develop their technology, but as of right no, it leaves a lot to be desired. ...in thier defense, i will say that their product is easy to use, and fast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 over the handful of years i have been doing this, i have seen several companies drop the ball on their product. i am just guessing here, but it seems like they feel they have made a succesful product, so they stop. i don't think that is a succesful route to take in the computer industry in general. things evolve so fast. look at the technology we had a couple of years ago. it was pretty much scanline, or trying to learn the finicky aspects of radiosity. ...granted i never used Lightscape. ..if you work for RPC, and are reading this, then use this information, and don't get mad about it. i understand that you support this site through advertising, but also realize that what we are saying here is valid market research for free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kippu Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 i second the above stated points .... rpc for GI ...yeay Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trick Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 ...i am not sure if they don't care that they wind up looking like a photomontage, or they just are not aware that they look like a photomontage... Even worse: a lot of clients (mostly architects) insist on people that look like a photomontage. When doing realistic rendered concept renderings, with little information about materials, finishes, details, etc. putting wrongly lit, unicolor contoured, handdrawn or flatshaded 3d people in your model just emphasizes the concept feeling. For this goal RPC's are more then perfect. In combination with RPC Creator Pro you can change the lighting and color correct existing libraries to your needs (you'll have to render them out first and reassemble them afterwards !) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 with RPC Creator Pro you can change the lighting and color correct existing libraries to your needs (you'll have to render them out first and reassemble them afterwards !) I bought Creator to make my own RPCs, but haven't used it yet. I would do NPR-type stuff with it. Within Cinema4D RPCs will work just fine, even within a GI scene. You simply exclude them from GI calcs. My problem is that I'm now trying to use FinalRender Stage2 for output, and RPCs don't work with that. Highly frustrating. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brolloks Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 I have to agree as well. Since moving to V-Ray I have had inconsistent results with RPC's. This includes them either not rendering at all or just looking out of place. We are now looking at full 3D people like the ones from Axyz and others. Having a pc spend 2 or 3 hours rendering a high res image over night for a deadline the following morning without knowing whether the rpc's will be there or not is just not feasible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ecastillor Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 now. ..in their favor I have to say that when doing animations using scanline with radiosity, they look OK, and the wow factor that I get from clients using moving RPCs is always there....how did you get those people or that water fountain to move like that????....I dont know of any software to make that happen so easy, without going trough the pain of a particle system or a complicated animation routine in max..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 I dont know of any software to make that happen so easy, without going trough the pain of a particle system or a complicated animation routine in max..... True, though once you do the work to set it up (or buy someone else's work) its there for the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 Within Cinema4D RPCs will work just fine, even within a GI scene. You simply exclude them from GI calcs. ..i can get them to work with Vray, but they don't respond to the GI due to the way they are designed. if i understand right, they are essentially a series of photo's that respong to the camera and their orientation. kind of like a static object VR. ..because they are a series of photos, the lighting is usually wrong. this keeps them from blending seemlessly into the enviroment. when i use them, i usually wind up in photoshop, trying to dodge and burn them to get the light values in the correct place. mayeb i am doing something wrong, but this has been my experience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quizzy Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 2D/2.5D RPC's (trees and people) are opacity mapped planes. You should treat them as such in your GI renderer. 3D/3D+ (cars, furniture etc..) objects are low poly objects with textures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Mottle Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 Hey guys, The issues you bring up in this thread are not unknown to ArchVision, but are not issues to all users either. I am working at VisMasters to bring on board options that round out the offering to include content and tools that help the vast majority of the visualization market as well as high end visualization professionals, who make up a great deal of this site. As we all know not all solutions are for every user. Although VisMasters is owned by ArchVision, I am not directly involved with the developments on the ArchVision side, I've forwarded this link to Randall, the President of ArchVision, and he will be able to address some of concerns people have and perhaps let you know about some of the developements we are working on. Cheers, Jeff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randall Stevens Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 Hello All, Jeff forwarded me the link to your thread so I thought I’d chime in. I appreciate the feedback and completely understand the desire to see image-based technologies like RPC keep up with the advances of the rendering engines being used today by so many of you. We share the same desire and have been working on new solutions but the problem is not an easy one. As Jeff alluded, we are aware of the weaknesses of using a purely image-based solution like ArchVision’s RPC People and Trees with the advanced rendering technologies being used by some customers. Image-based representations of organic objects such as people or trees, including the RPC line of products, become a challenge when the expectation is for those objects to interact in a natural way with the artificial light in a scene. Images of people are “pre-lit” when the image is captured. Re-lighting that image is a challenge but we have been working on some ways to approach the problem for the past couple of years. I’ve included some sample images with this post that show how an image-based tree can be “re-lit” based on global illumination maps. The second image shows the ability to drastically change the appearance of the tree to better match the background image. We’re currently working on ways of introducing this technology through a Photoshop plug-in. The other way to tackle the problem is to include some underlying geometry with the content so that it can interact with the light in the scene. For organic objects like the people and trees, an underlying geometric structure becomes a challenge as you begin trading detail for rendering speed. We announced last summer that we have begun working with Bionatics to bring new tree/plant solutions to the market. For ArchVision this was a natural evolution meant to compliment the purely image-based approach we have with the existing RPC solutions. That work is underway. In regards to ArchVision’s RPC products not working properly with some of the plug-in rendering engines that is a tough one for us. In products like 3ds max and VIZ, we pass geometry and texture data into the underlying render pipe so what happens to that data once it is intercepted by the plug-in renderer is out of our control. That may sound like a “pass the buck” comment but for most rendering issues it is true. There are some strange things that can happen when you combine two “add-on” or “plug-in” products because each product may be doing or expecting different things than the other at the beginning or end of the rendering thread. When those are identified ArchVision is always more than happy to work with other development teams to sort through and attempt to fix the problem. If you know of a specific problem with a plug-in renderer please let them know how important it is to see the RPC content handled more appropriately. Our development team will bend over backwards to help wherever we can. ArchVision serves a broad range of customers in the design visualization field from beginners to the experts that visit CGarchitect.com. Most are using plain old vanilla scanline rendering while some have graduated to more advanced solutions like V-Ray and FinalRender. When developing products to fill the needs of this broad audience we often find that a single product cannot serve everyone. VisMasters is one way we try to bridge that gap by providing a broader range of visualization product choices while continuing to bring the quality of service that customers have come to appreciate from ArchVision. We also devote thousands of hours of R&D each year in developing new products and technology. We appreciate everyone who has supported our development efforts over the years and look forward to continuing to provide innovative solution to the design visualization market. Thanks, Randall Stevens President / CEO ArchVision, Inc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted February 17, 2006 Share Posted February 17, 2006 Hi Randall! I appreciate the time you've taken to give us some feedback on what you guys are doing to improve the RPC content. I look forward to seeing what sort of new stuff you'll be developing. Here's the $64,000 question. Any time-line on the release of those trees? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randall Stevens Posted February 18, 2006 Share Posted February 18, 2006 Thanks Brian, No specific time-line yet but our development schedule calls for something later this year. I learned a long time ago that software development timelines are difficult to predict and always wrong! We're working on a new version of ArchVision Composer that will be more tightly integrated with Photoshop. That is the platform we will most likely use to introduce the re-lighting technology. Thanks, Randall Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clausbang Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 Hi all Great to hear about the developments Randall. Just to show people how RPC basically works try the link below. http://www.turntool.com/test/look_at_objects/ When you spin the character it (almost) looks like 3D, but look at it from the top, and you can see that it is a plane (or actually several planes). You can also get the source to see it how its done. It's actually an old real-time trick. Claus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neelabh_m Posted March 14, 2006 Share Posted March 14, 2006 well they sure have come up with mental ray supporting rpc. thats a big breakthrough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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