emRPC4 v.4.0 (alpha) - "Cloudalypse".

A little over two minutes of test-renderings using the alpha version of emRPC4.
All the frames for this video were rendered in 1440x810 and the render times (with ambient occlusion, global illumination and motion blur) never exceeded 42 seconds per frame on an Intel i7, even though the particle count was up to over 16 million.

The video was created on a single workstation with an Intel i7 processor, 12 Gig RAM and Softimage 2011 SAP.
The compositing was done with the Fx Tree, the music with Reason 4.0.

In the lower-left corner of the video you can monitor the current particle count, the average render time, the active render effects (ambient occlusion, motion blur, ..) and the additional plugins that were used to animate the particles.

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 32 bit and 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).

A video showing some of the new features can be watched here.

POLYNOID, a cluster of young talented guys from Berlin, did the following beautiful work using - amongst other things - emRPC4 and emFluid4:

This is a very nice clip made by Bloom Studio for the Thinking Digital Ident 2011.
About 90 percent of the renderings in the clip were done with emRPC4.

The following music video made by the German company OPTIX Digital Pictures for the artist KRAUSE.
It was rendered with an earlier beta version of emRPC4.