Description
emRPC4 is a renderer that is specialized on rendering point clouds. It is implemented as an ICE node and a bunch of compounds that render point clouds directly to disk as TARGA, Softimage, SGI or OpenEXR images (latter is only available for Windows 64 bit).
Even though the node renders the particles in a rather primitive way it can come in handy when dealing with many particles, because it has one great feature: it is fast, so rendering a frame generally only takes a few seconds. Together with the ability to have self-shadowing, ambient occlusion and global illumination it is a great tool for those jobs that need to be done quickly.
The plugin consists of an Addon that contains a "DLL" file (Windows) or "so" file (Linux) for the render node (compiled C++ code for 64 bit versions of Softimage). Additionally, there are many compounds that come along.
Being an ICE node makes emRPC4 really flexible: all the great ICE functionality can be used to set the render parameters for each particle (or strand) separately. For example you can make some of the particles cast global illumination whereas others don't. Or use different lighting models and drawing modes for different particles.
emRPC4 is well integrated into ICE and you use it just as easily as all the other nodes and compounds in ICE.
Some Features
- Renders particles and strands.
- Flicker free results.
- Per-particle render settings.
- Ambient occlusion.
- Global illumination.
- Self-shadowing.
- Shadows on masks.
- Motion blur.
- Depth of field.
- Special emRPC4-viewer within Softimage (Custom Display Host).