ArchVision's™ RPC™ Helpers and Mass Populate Tools

ArchVision's™ RPC™ Helpers and Mass Populate Tools

By Jeff Mottle (jmottle@cgarchitect.com)

Jeff Mottle is the President and Founder of CGarchitect.com and is the North American Creative Director for Smoothe.

In a follow up article to last week's review of ArchVison's RPC™ Parking Lot Cars™, we bring to light some exciting developments that have made their way into the just released RPC™ 3.4 Plug-in. Two new features that are sure to save users or RPC content a ton of time are the RPC Helper and Mass Populate Tools.

You may have wondered in my last review how I randomly placed 1000 test cars in my scene without spending a week doing it, or perhaps you are designing a large shoping mall and are dreading having to place hundreds of people manually in your scene. If either of these sound familar then you will surely want to check out how these two new tools can help you.

RPC Helpers

Users who install the version 3.4 plugin will find a new item in their Helpers pull down called RPC Helpers. This new set contains four new Object types that are incredibly powerful. They are: RPC Proxy, RPC Attractor, RPC Focus, and RPC Repulsor. All of these tools are designed to help place large amounts of RPC data in your scenes.

The RPC Proxy

The RPC Proxy helper is a small placeholder that you position in your scene to later be replaced with RPC content. It is similar to the placeholder that is used for your RPC content before rendertime, but you can consider a proxy a placeholder for the placeholder. The benefit of using the RPC Proxy is its small overhead (a simple 2D spline) and its integration with the Mass Poplulate Tools, which we will examine a little bit later. RPC Proxies can be placed in your scene using array or spray tools and can be copied.


RPC Helper scene Icons


A scene with several RPC Proxy Helpers positioned



The RPC Attractor

The next three helpers are in essence a set of space warps for your RPC Content. The RPC Attractor is also a simple 2D spline object, like the proxy, that is placed in your scene to affect the RPC Proxies. As its name suggests, placing an attractor will literally attract the RPC Content to the location of the RPC Attractor. This is very useful in a number of situations. In a parking lot, we all know that eveyone will naturally park closest to the building entrance. By simply placing an attractor at the doors the majority of your cars will populate closest to the doors, leaving the far parking stalls empty. In a large crowd scene, if there is a central point of action for the scene your people will congragate towards this area as long as you place an attractor there. The same could also be done for your large planting areas. You could for example place an attractor near a water feature which is wher most trees and plants would grow closest to. The strength of your attractor can be varied from a value of 1-100.


A grouping of Proxies with an Attractor positioned in the top middle. (For the purposes of this review this image can be substituted in the examples below for Repulsors and Focus)


A scene of people positioned and rendered from the proxies in the image above.


The same scene, but with the attractor enabled.


The RPC Repulsor

Like the RPC Attractor helper however as you would expect the Repulsor helper acts in the exact opposite way.


In this image a repulsor was placed in the top middle in the same positions that the attractor was previously placed.


The RPC Focus

The last helper is called RPC Focus, and acts similarily to the Attractor, however rather than physically attracting content to one spot this helper attracts the proxy's focus. I would liken this helper to a look at controller. The most usefull scenario would be a large crowd scene. Let's assume there is a concert going on in your rendering of a new entertainment complex. Obvisouly you would use an attractor at the starge area, as we all know that people will rush the stage, but what do you do if the action is hapening at stage left and everyone is looking at stage right? Obviouly people do not run from side to side they instead turn their bodies. This is where the RPC Focus helper comes into play. Rather than having to manually turn all of the content to face the subject, you simply use a Focus helper.


A scene with a Focus helper enabled. Note that all of the people are all looking to the spot where the Attractor in the first example was placed.

Mass Populate

As I mentioned earlier, the RPC Helpers rely on the new Mass Populate tool to help you even further. Obviouly you can place the RPC Proxies in your scene, but now you need a way to tell the Proxies which content they need to be substitued for and which proxies will even be populated. There are essentialy three parts to the Mass Populate tool; these are Rule Sets, Proxy/Content Selection and Atractor/Repulsor/Focus settings. The process you go through to use this tool is as follows: First you place all of your proxies in your scene. In a parking lot this would mean placing a proxy in all of your parking stalls or in a crowd or forest scene spraying the proxies randomly. Once the proxies are placed you need to establish a Rule Set. These are the rules that will be applied to a given set RPC Content. Rule Sets can be named anything you choose and are stored for later retrieval. One you have named your ruleset you simply browse your library of RPC Content and check the individual content or groups of content you wish to place and be a part of this Rule Set. You then choose all of the proxies that are to be included in this set and press populate. A few seconds later all of your proxies are randomly swaped out for the content placeholders. Now you may be aking yourself, yes but how do I make it so that I only place four Volkswagon Beetles in my scene instead of 15? Simple. The second part of this section allows you to configure the percentage of each content type in your ruleset. You can enter 1% VW Beetles and 35% Luxury Sedans. The RPC Plug-in will recalulate the scene for you and you need then only to re-populate your scene.

The last section of the Rule Set, should you wish to use them, are the Attractor/Repulsor/Focus settings. If any of these are placed in your scene they will all show up in this last section. You just have to specify which ones you wish to use and chose a strength value.





Another pretty handy feature is the Random Trasnsforms box. This feature allows you to apply random transformations to your proxies. This is a very useful feaure in parking lots. A simple array will position your cars with surgical precision, but I know from experience that 80% of the population, where I live at least, couldn't park between two white lines if their lives depended upon it. For those people there is the Random Transform tool to arrange your parkign lot with varying degrees of "parking accuracy".




Parking lot with Random Transformations applied


Conclusion

I had a chance to play with this Plug-in for quite while and I have to admit I was very impressed! This opens all sorts of doors for quickly placing content in your scene that before would have and did take hours to do. I completed a project not too long ago where I placed over 700 RPC Trees and I have to say this would have been a welcome addition to the toolset. I think the only thing I would wish for is the ability to use this plugin on content that was not neccesarily RPC based.
I should also mention that those of you that have the plugin and want to learn more or for those of you contemplating purchasing it, there is a fantasctic set of tutorials on the ArchVision site that can be viewed by everyone. They are very well laid out and will get you up and running in a matter of minutes. They can be viewed here: http://www.archvision.com/Tutorials.cfm

For more information about ArchVision and the RPC™ Plugins, please visit: http://www.archvision.com

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