Neat workflow tricks with RC + FP

[George]

For some reason I couldn't find a reply button for the Proxy thread, so i've made this new one.

Railclone objects are essentially made up of two things:

1) Sweep profiles (ie. road)
2) Cloned elements (ie. lamp-posts)

Most of the time, the cloned elements add the most to the polygon count, and the thing is, they don't need to be deformed. I recently had to create an elevated monorail track that serviced a ~20x30km area, and it's bloody huge! What I did was to choose and non-deformed objects and do the following:

1) Copy the segment, replace the cloned elements (columns, etc.) with long triangles at their origins, and delete the deformed sweep (the track).
2) Copy the RC object, rename to "Spawner_RailClone_Something", and replace it's segment with the new one.
3) Use this new RC object as a reference object for Forest Pro to place an instance of the columns at each triangle.

This made viewport responsiveness a lot better, and gave all the other advantages of FP like instancing (lower memory), frustum culling, etc.

[iToo]

This is exactly what RailClone 1.1 does, using render instances for the cloned elements, and meshes for the items that requires deformation. The process is automatic and transparent to the user.

The following scene is a stress test using this version. Render stats were 54 sec., 1.2 Gb. RAM for a -virtual- geometry of 64 mill. polys:



We have plans to release the first beta in the next days, as soon as we complete the stability tests.

PD: We just fixed the reply button issue.