Why Architects Hate Entourage

March 12, 2015 Leave a comment

Most arch visualization folks hate entourage. They hate seeing people in their renderings. They hate that they have to try to reproduce the world “around” their structures. They hate anything that breaks the realm of photorealism. They hate having to painstakingly place individual people in their scenes. They hate that the model of car they personally drive isn’t readily available to drop into their model. Haters gonna hate.

But you know who loves entourage? Clients! They love seeing their mall parking lot full of cars (customers!). They love seeing rows of semi trucks docked behind their warehouse (customers!). They love seeing life brimming in their restaurants, concert halls, sports venues and retail shops (customers!). We can talk about how entourage helps communicate scale; blah, blah, blah. In the end, customers want to feel great about their new project. Anything you can do to convey warm, happy thoughts about how well the project is going to be received transmits those happy thoughts. Architectural entourage can help.

In late 2013 I wrote a post titled Rendering vs Presentation that outlined our view of the changing visualization workflow in the design industry. The democratization of visualization is changing who is creating the communication work-product, what tools they’re using, and the usefulness in various parts of the design/customer-interaction process. No longer is visualization relegated to “that guy in the corner” who is the only one with the tenacity (read crazy enough) to master the tools used to create photorealistic renderings. Rather, visuals generated from 3D models are being used to convey design intent in presentations at key points throughout the design process.  A new generation or two of new hires joining the workforce with 3D skills combined with less costly software solutions translates into  value understood by practitioner and client alike.

Entourage WorkshopOne of our goals in 2014 was to increase the usefulness of RPCs within Revit by providing users with the tools they need to customize the look and feel of the RPCs in their scenes. Entourage Workshop was born. Entourage Workshop is a Revit add-in that lets you create and apply Styles to RPC people and trees in your model. These Styles control the type of geometry and appearance (color, transparency and brightness) of the RPCs in your model allowing you to achieve photorealistic and non-photorealistic presentation results.

Entourage Workshop lets you create reusable Styles for achieving silhouettes of people or trees, control the model-view geometry of the RPCs in your scene including removal of the “base” and fine-tune the brightness of the RPCs to better match your scene in the various rendering modes.

There’s a love/hate relationship with entourage. We’ve heard thousands of stories over the years. The goal of RPC and Entourage Workshop is to help you learn to love entourage. Give your clients visuals, chocked-full of entourage, with your own personal Style. What’s not to love!

Filed under Innovations + Observations, Products, Revit Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Power of Universal Tags

November 18, 2014 Leave a comment

We’ve been hard at work on the ability to easily convert 2D textures into RPC and now have a new Dashboard-integrated RPC Creator tool in widespread use. Converting your PNG and TIFF cutouts into RPC is as easy as dragging and dropping those alpha-masked images onto the Drop Zone within the RPC Creator. Add a Name and Height and an RPC is generated complete with a custom icon and preview. As an RPC you’ll find many advantages over the original PNG or TIFF format including automatic Sketchup-style “Face Me” capabilities within applications like 3ds Max, Revit and Autocad. For those of you who have gone through the process of trying to get your 2D cutouts to play nicely in those apps you know how many steps it takes to accomplish what should be a simple task. RPC makes that pain go away.

We’re also introducing the first of a series of organizational tools designed to make finding the right content easy. Accompanying the RPC Creator is a new Tag Editor. The Tag Editor lets you add Tags (metadata) to the RPCs you create. These Tags make content searchable within Dashboard. We’re also introducing a visual tag-cloud feature called Filters that presents the Tags that have been added to content in an easy-to-navigate visual interface. Click on a Tag or Tags and quickly filter to the content you need.

Filters

As we began working on these new features we thought about how best to help you organize and make use of your content. We made several observations:

Observation #1: Everyone knows tagging can be a powerful organizing tool but there’s one big problem… nobody wants to spend time tagging things.

Observation #2: A lot of the content you use is also being used by other people around the world.

So why not take advantage of the fact that the same content is in use across the globe and let Tags automatically follow the same content? With Dashboard we have the ability to do just that! We’re excited to introduce a concept we call Universal Tags. Here’s how it works. We don’t share your content. In fact, your content never has to leave your local environment for Universal Tags to work. We create a unique identifier for each piece of content and use that to track the Tags associated with the content. The effect is that when you introduce a piece of content into your own environment that has been viewed in Dashboard by someone else, we essentially get an up-vote  for common Tags that have been associated with that content. After a specified number of up-votes the Tags can be converted to public tags.  If no one has added tags or you’re the first to introduce the content to Dashboard you’ll have to add your own tags. It’s a powerful network effect, as tags are added by one person everyone benefits!

As you know, information is only as useful as it is accurate. So it’s up to you to add meaningful tags. The Tag Editor will let you remove Tags that you don’t find useful and we use those as votes as to the value of that Tag to others.  We also use this concept to automatically provide a Name and Height to RPCs during the RPC Creation process so assigning a descriptive name and accurate height helps everyone.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these new features.

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Presentation Styles of Christopher Dutton [Ocean Designs]

November 3, 2014 Leave a comment

This month we’re profiling the work of Christopher Dutton of Ocean Designs in San Diego, California.  Christopher contacted us after he saw the new Presentation Styles section of our blog and offered to pass along some tips for creating better work in Revit.  Following are some of Christopher’s Revit renderings as well as some tips, tricks and techniques he’s learned along the way:

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Materials: “Materials, materials, materials! If you’re using the out-of-the-box materials that come with Revit, find ones that are as close as possible to what you want, then take the time to customize them in the Material Editor to get them even more accurate. Pay special attention to the scale of material and bump images to make sure they are properly sized (for example, roofing, tiles and siding are critical).”

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“Also, use the tint setting to customize the color of your materials. This usually takes some trial and error to get right, so you’ll need to do some low-quality renderings to test your colors. Another alternative that’s worth the time is finding custom material images. These can be found doing a web search, through third-parties and are slowly starting to be provided by manufacturers. Lastly, be sure to fine-tune the settings for glazing to optimize reflectivity and translucency. Getting the right effect from your glass can make a huge difference.”

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Content: “Start building a robust content library. There are many great resources online for downloading custom families, either from other users, third parties or manufacturers. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, take the time to create a custom family. Most of the time you’ll find another project to use it in later, so it’ll be worth it. Custom families will help add another level of detail and realism to your renderings so they don’t look so generic.”

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Lighting: “Lighting is key. For exterior shots, take into consideration your camera angles and prominent architectural elements when setting the sun angle so that you get nice shadow lines that accentuate depth and details of your building. Mid-morning and late-afternoon sun settings will usually give you a softer light and create shallower shadow casts that won’t engulf the faces of the structure, especially at eaves and overhangs.”

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Interiors: “For interior shots, proper selection and placement of light fixtures will really make your renderings pop. Also, mid-day sun will provide indirect exterior lighting and help eliminate long, distracting shadow lines at exterior openings. Make sure to set up light groups and turn off the groups that don’t affect the area you’re rendering to eliminate unwanted light casting and reduce the amount of processing.”

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Plantings: “Planting. Revit’s RPC plant library isn’t always perfect [… Christophers choice of words, not ours 😉  Perfect.. no, but pretty darn good!], but find plants and trees that you like and locate them to help accentuate and add texture and context to the composition of your rendering. I’ve found that locating a tree in the foreground just outside of the field of view so that some of the outer leaves and branches are at the edge of your view can help frame in your image and add a level of realism.”

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Backgrounds:  “Don’t use Revit’s sky and clouds for your background. It increases your rendering time and the quality is usually not that great. Build a library of images that you can use as backgrounds (the higher-res the better). I’ve created a library with categories such as sky, neighborhoods, landscapes, hills and valleys, cityscapes, etc.  Find images that relate to the context, scale and camera angle of your renderings. Render with the background style set to “Color” and “White (255-255-255)”. When the rendering is complete, select “Export” and save the image as a PNG. This will save your image with a blank background. Then you can open the PNG file in a photo editing program such as Photoshop and drop the background image you’ve selected behind your rendering. Scale and move the background image as needed to fit with the rendering and then adjust the layer’s brightness, contrast and exposure to get it to blend properly.”

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“Lastly, get creative with your camera angles. Use overhead views, think about perspective and focal point as well as overall context.  Hope everyone can find something useful to take from this!”

Thanks for the tips Christopher!

If you’d like to show off your work send an email to rstevens@archvision.com and we’ll work to feature you on the blog and in an upcoming newsletter!

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Filed under Revit Tagged with ,

Presentation Styles of Corbin Savopoulos [MVE & Partners]

October 6, 2014 Leave a comment

This month we’re profiling the work of Corbin Savopoulos of MVE & Partners (Irvine, California).  We came across Corbin’s work after seeing a post on the Autodesk Revit Forum regarding non-realistic effects with RPCs.  Corbin was looking for ways to affect the geometry and take advantage of the various line/shading modes available in Revit.  We shared some insights into a new project we have underway (project named Ghost) that will provide some great new non-photorealistic workflows with RPCs within Revit.  More on this next month!  You can get a little preview of the direction in our response here.

Corbin shared some of his work which we’re profiling here.  Corbin says his intent is to create a “soft/light watercolor style efficiently & effectively”.  That’s exactly what caught our eye.  As you can see from these renderings, mission accomplished!

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How does Corbin accomplish this look?  Revit, Layers & Photoshop!  Here’s some tips Corbin shared…

“One alternative I have setup before was to export three versions of the same elevation by temporarily using view templates and overlay them together in photoshop (as smart objects so I can automatically reload changes).

  • Export 1 (Optional)  – (Consistent Color) – No Shadows. No Entourage/Planting. This will be used as your first layer (temporary) in photoshop set as normal. Used purely as a temporary color selector/wand tool for setting up your masks for any additional effects such as storefront images. Therefore, once you are done with masking (mask applied to groups, not layer) turn off this layer/smart object.
  • Export 2 – (Realistic) Override all lines/surface patterns under ‘Projection/Surface’ in Visibility/Graphics to solid white except Entourage/Planting. No Shadows. This will be second layer (overlay) in photoshop set as multiply. White surfaces of building will not effect main colors.
  • Export 3 – (Consistent Color) Turn on shadows to your liking. No Entourage/Planting. This will be used as your third layer (main) in photoshop set as normal.

*Note: Folder structure in photoshop is very important in order for advanced PSD to operate efficiently.”

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Thanks for the tips Corbin!

If you’d like to show off your work send an email to rstevens@archvision.com and we’ll work to feature you on the blog and in an upcoming newsletter!

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Presentation Styles of Dan Nevin [Alisco Designs]

August 29, 2014 Leave a comment

When we come across great work we like to celebrate and share it with all of you.  Welcome to the new Presentation Styles section of our blog!

We’re kicking things off with the great work of Dan Nevin who works with Alisco Designs in Australia (http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au/).

Cannon St 4(Dan Nevin | Alisco Designs | http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au)

We asked Dan if he had any tips or tricks for getting great results from renderings in Revit and here’s what he had to say:

“As for tips and tricks mate here are a few things that hopefully can help a few people:

  • Materials are very important when rendering. You want to get your materials as close to what you want as you can, colour wise and bump wise. I find that rendering by region is a good way to check this, you can render at a higher quality without it taking anywhere near as long.

262 James 3(Dan Nevin | Alisco Designs | http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au)

  • Re-render and re-render. You can never do enough draft renders. This saves a lot of time picking up things you may have missed before tying up your computer for long periods of time. The closer you think you are to having it right the higher you make your quality. The region tool is great for this if you want to render an area in the highest quality before doing your final render.

67(Dan Nevin | Alisco Designs | http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au)

  • Once you have your final render, you may want to up the saturation and contrast to your image. This is done best using a program like Photoshop. But if you can’t get your hands on Photoshop there are other photo editing programs out there that will do the basics that you need (I am currently using paint.net). play around with your editing tools a lot, go from over saturated to under saturated just to get a feel for what the image colours are doing, then adjust it until you are happy. Do the same with the contrast. I find that adjusting the contrast of an image can have a negative effect on the colours so you may want to do this before the saturation or just remember to double check your saturation afterwards.

106 Bridge St(Dan Nevin | Alisco Designs | http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au)

These are just my steps when working on my renderings, different things work for different people so don’t expect great results immediately. Find something that works for you. In the end all good renders come down to one thing, time. The more you spend the better your result.”

Lionel Drive 2(Dan Nevin | Alisco Designs | http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au)

Awesome work Dan and thanks for sharing!

If you’d like to show off your work send an email to rstevens@archvision.com and we’ll work to feature you on the blog and in an upcoming newsletter!

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kitchen(Dan Nevin | Alisco Designs | http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au)

Lionel Drive(Dan Nevin | Alisco Designs | http://www.aliscodesigns.com.au)

 

 

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Dashboard 2.1 Adds Viewport Mode and Channel Filters

August 6, 2014 Leave a comment

A new version (2.1.5) of Dashboard has just released that includes a couple of significant features we think you’ll enjoy.  You can download the latest installer at https://archvision.com/dashboard/download.
 
Viewport
 
Viewport for Dashboard is a new 3D viewing mode that lets you preview your RPCs in full 3D.  For 2D motion RPCs (2.5D) it will also let you scrub through the animation sequence with a simple time slider.
 
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Besides being a great new RPC preview tool Viewport for Dashboard can drastically improve your work flow for using RPCs in Photoshop.  If the name Viewport sounds familiar it might be because you’ve been using the RPC Viewport plug-in for Photoshop.  That plug-in allows you to open and view RPCs directly in Photoshop, choose a viewing angle, and open the chosen view onto a new layer.  Sounds ok but for anybody whose used the tool to place lots of RPCs the process can be tedious.  When you use the Viewport plug-in directly in Photoshop it has to close each time in order to place the content on a new layer meaning you have to go back into the menu to initiate it each time.  Viewport for Dashboard replaces that workflow.
 
Now when you preview an RPC directly in Dashboard using the new Viewport viewing mode you can choose your viewing angle and click the Render button.  A small thumbnail will appear just below the Render button that you can then drag & drop directly into Photoshop.  If you’re using Photoshop CS5 or above the new rendered view of your RPC will be placed on a new layer as a Smart Object that you can scale and place within your scene.
 
We think you’ll find this new work-flow to be a huge time saver when using your RPCs in Photoshop.  Hopefully you’ll love us for it rather than cursing us for not having it sooner!
 
Filters
 
We’re continuing to roll in expanded features to the core of Dashboard.  With this new release you’ll see the addition of Filters at the bottom of the browser.  
 
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The idea is to take meta data associated with content and use it as a Tag Cloud.  That Tag Cloud can then be used to filter content being viewed in each Channel.  For example, if you click on the People Channel and open the Filters panel you’ll see all of the Tags currently associated with the content in that Channel.  The Tag Cloud will by default sort by Popularity of the tag but you can also choose to display them alphabetically.  Clicking on one of the Tags will filter the content within that Channel to show only those RPCs that have that Tag.  Pretty simple.  Choose an additional tag from the cloud and you’re performing a boolean “and” search.  Clicking on “female” and “sitting” will show you only the RPCs of sitting females. There’s also a new “local only” option on the Filter bar that lets you choose to see only content that resides locally (ie. already downloaded).

 
Give it a try! It can be a huge time saver.  We believe the concept of filtering rather than explicit searches provides you with an alternative quick way to drill down to just the right content in an intuitive, visual interface.  

Filed under Announcements, Products Tagged with ,

The (near) Future of RPC – Custom Content

December 17, 2013 4 Comments

Several members of our team traveled to Las Vegas week before last for Autodesk University 2013. In conjunction with the developer meetings and user events we held our own private gathering with a couple dozen ArchVision customers. During that event we gave everyone an update of the latest commercially available products as well as a preview of some things we’ve been working on. We brought a little bit of Kentucky with us hosting a bourbon tasting event at the Emeril Lagasse restaurant Table 10. Everyone seemed to enjoy the bourbon and the company. The official story is everyone behaved themselves. But not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!

RPC_creatorWe’re weeks away from beginning to release a new RPC creation tool. I say “beginning to release” because we plan to slow-roll this out to select alpha/beta testers in January. As those in attendance at the “Bourbon Club” event in Vegas witnessed first hand, it’s really cool! RPC Creator will be integrated tightly with Dashboard. You can drag and drop any 32-bit PNG or TIF image onto the RPC Creator tool within Dashboard and we’ll automagically create an RPC of that image for you, complete with a custom icon and preview. All you need to do is give it a Name and a Height so it will scale properly in your scene. A few seconds later you can begin dragging and dropping that RPC into Revit, 3ds Max or Autocad!

If you’re like most you have quite a collection of both commercially available imagery as well as your own custom images painstakingly matted out in Photoshop or some other image editing tool. With the new RPC Creator tool you’ll be able to convert each of those images into a fully functioning RPC in seconds. We think one of the most valuable aspects of the RPC platform is the ability to get image-based data into an application like Revit or 3ds Max with the least amount of effort. As a native image/texture you’d have to create geometry in your scene, add the image as a texture to a material, assign the material, figure out how to get that geometry to always face your camera, etc. Many, many steps and depending on the application, maybe impossible to do (does Revit even have a “look at” feature???). As an RPC, drag and drop it into your scene with no additional steps.

Another feature of Dashboard that will be rolling out in conjunction with the RPC Creator will be the ability to add Tags to any RPC. These tags are then search-able making it easy to find the content you’re looking for. We’re also making those tags “universal” meaning if you’ve added a tag to an RPC, everyone else in the world using that RPC benefits by being able to search on that tag. We think this will have an incredibly powerful network effect on the way content is searched and managed within Dashboard. The beauty of this universal tagging approach to content is that you didn’t have to share the content itself for the tags to be inherited. Without getting into too much detail, imagine that you purchased a commercially available library of image-based content that you want to convert to RPC. There are likely thousands of others around the world who did the same thing. If you add a tag to a piece of content that tag will automatically associate itself with an instance of that content anywhere it is seen by Dashboard! Think of it as crowd-sourcing of tags. Small, incrementally valuable pieces of information aggregate with the content. The community builds value around their assets. We think it will be a win-win for everyone.

We’re excited about getting this in your hands and working feverishly to finish up some of the final details. If you have a lot of 32-bit imagery and you’d like to be one of our RPC Creator betas, let us know. Talk to you soon.

Randall

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Rendering vs Presentation

November 14, 2013 4 Comments

Images courtesy of Steven Shell (http://scshell.wordpress.com/)

For years we considered RPC a “rendering” tool, designed to help create photorealistic imagery quickly and easily.  Photorealism was at the core of our DNA.  How deep? The “P” in RPC stands for “Photorealistic” (RPC = Rich Photorealistic Content)! Our ongoing observations of how imagery is created has led us to a broader definition of where and how our products are (or could be) used.  Many more people are creating “Presentations” as opposed to “Renderings”.  What’s the difference?  I think it has less to do with the technical definition than it does the workflow.  In the early days of design visualization someone created a 3D model and then created “renderings” in specialized software like 3dsMax where materials and lighting were painstakingly added to produce an image.  The workflow looked something like 2D Cad > 3D Model > Materials > Lighting > Rendering  where multiple specialists generally assumed roles along that process to produce visuals and the person creating the design was generally not the person creating the renderings.

I’ll claim the traditional world of design visualization changed when Sketchup was introduced.  Sketchup wasn’t about rendering, it was about modeling and for the first time (Another claim… the magic was the the push/pull feature – http://www.google.com/patents/US6628279) 3d modeling became accessible to every designer no matter the level of cad/graphics proficiency.  I can remember being at various tradeshows when Sketchup was first introduced and witnessing older architects (who had largely skipped CAD) almost giddy with excitement because they now had a tool that wasn’t intimidating or downright scary to use.  That’s software magic and anyone who was around Brad Schell and the @Last Software team in those early days knows exactly what I’m talking about.  I know for ArchVision it was a bit of a paradigm challenge as we worked to understand how RPC could and should play in this new world of design “modeling”.  There wasn’t a traditional “rendering” process to interface with.  We punted on trying to make RPC function directly inside Sketchup, recognizing the technical advantage of RPC at the time was in the “rendering” pipeline and not in this new world that was a hybrid of both modeling and visualization.  With the ongoing success of Revit we’ve changed our tune.  What we now think of as “Presentation” is here to stay and we believe will continue to be the dominant form of design visualization in the future.

I need to give credit to my friend Steven Shell, who I met at the RTC Conference (http://www.rtcevents.com) this past summer, for pushing me to think about this a bit more.  Steven does some incredible “presentation” and rendering work natively within Revit.  You should check out his website (http://www.scshell.com/) and blog (http://scshell.wordpress.com/) to see some of his work.  Steven is also a great teacher so if you get a chance to sit in on one of his classes don’t miss it!  He’ll be passing on some of his wisdom at Autodesk University later this month – https://events.au.autodesk.com/connect/speakerDetail.ww?PERSON_ID=31B2FC96BD614DDB34740336273DBBC2.  Steven is an architect who uses Revit to create great communication tools to share with his clients.  No external renderer, no Photoshop.  Pure presentation techniques from within Revit.

What used to be a multi-step (and often multi-disciplined) approach to creating visualizations of a design are now emanating from a single-step process; building a model.  All of the tools, previously part of a linear production line process for producing a rendering, are now “built-in” and the visuals are quickly becoming a byproduct of the modeling process.  This is leading ArchVision to look for opportunities to extend RPC to accommodate these new workflows.  Watch for new enhancements to the way RPC works in Revit in the coming months.  We’re adding the ability to display silhouetted views of RPCs within Revit as an alternative to the default photorealistic views.  Next up will be the ability to assign and manage varying geometric representations of content.  All of these enhancements acknowledge that design visualization is evolving and becoming more accessible.  Great news for the design industry!

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Dashboard… ArchVision’s 3rd Epoch

October 21, 2013 Leave a comment

Hard to believe but RPC recently celebrated it’s 15th birthday!  The original 3D Studio RPC plug-in and a whopping 32 pieces of RPC content were introduced to the world at the AEC Systems tradeshow [Booth 631] in Chicago in June of 1998.  The “ArchSoft RealPeople Plug-in” with Casual People Vol 1 was $399.  Business People Vol 1 was another $199.  How things have changed!

Over the years ArchVision’s RPC products moved beyond a relatively simple 3D Studio plug-in and a handful of content libraries to plug-in or native RPC support for over a dozen design/rendering platforms, several thousand RPCs produced by ArchVision and tens of thousands of custom RPCs created by our users.  In hindsight I can break the past 15 years into two major epochs.  The first was one of easing RPC integration with our partner’s software products and continued growth and supply of RPC content.  By 2005 ArchVision had produced and released over 100 content collections and supporting over a dozen rendering applications including most industry standard Autodesk, Bentley and Adobe products.  A customer purchasing all of our products would find a sticker shock of nearly $30,000 at checkout!

Beginning in 2005 we began making major investments in our back-end infrastructure; setting the stage to move to a subscription-based licensing model.  January 2007 brought the start of RPCs second epoch, RPC All Access.  RPC All Access took what was previously $30,000 of software and made it all available for $499 per year!  A huge value proposition for our customers and a dramatic change in how we thought about our products and business model.

DashboardThe launch and iterative release of our Dashboard product over the past couple of years is ushering in our latest epoch in delivering relevant design visualization and content management solutions.  Our goal is to remain current with changes in our customers evolving production environments and continue to provide value.  We have found ourselves serving not only full-time visualization artists using products like 3ds Max but also many architects creating visuals directly inside products like Revit.  We see this as a challenge to move beyond “Rendering” to that of helping create “Presentations”.  We’re excited about ArchVision Dashboard as it is setting the stage for a bevy of new features and services to help in this transition.  Following is a rundown of the latest RPC features enabled by Dashboard and a sneak peek at features we have in the pipeline.

Drag & Drop

Support for RPC with Revit goes all the way back to Revit 3, prior to Autodesk’s acquisition of the platform.  Most recently, Autodesk chose RPC as the native tree/plant solution for Revit.  Revit users will find a good selection of tree and plants shipping with the product.  Getting additional RPCs outside of what shipped with the product was another matter.   As I’m sure many of you are painfully aware, getting an RPC from All Access into Revit was over 20 steps!  We found that unacceptable and went to work on making that a one-step process from Dashboard.  Now users can drag & drop any RPC from Dashboard directly into their Revit (2013 and above) model.  You can also Drag & Drop directly into 3ds Max and Autocad from Dashboard.

Channels

Dashboard_ChannelsOne of the primary goals of Dashboard is to provide improved ways to organize and search your content.  Channels are one of our first organizing tools.  We think of Channels as the first order of organization designed for visual browsing.  Clicking on a Channel within Dashboard filters specific content that has been tagged to that channel.  Dashboard supports what is called a “many-to-many” relationship between content and Channels.  For example, you may find the same Oak Tree RPC in the Trees Channel as well as the Revit Channel.  Channels represent different ways of organizing all of your content into logical groupings.  A future update of Dashboard will allow you to create your own Channels and organize content in new ways.

Search

Search is one of the easiest ways to find content.  In order for search to be effective the content being searched must carry the appropriate “tags” or “metadata” relevant to that piece of content.  With Dashboard we’ve made all content search-able by their tags.

Beacon

updates_1A great feature of Dashboard is the ability to monitor the applications you have installed that support RPC and help you keep RPC Plug-ins and related software installed and up-to-date.  We call the service that enables this feature “Beacon”.  Beacon keeps track of the current versions of software that are available and alerts you within Dashboard of any updates that are available. One click within Dashboard is all it takes to keep plug-ins up-to-date.

User-based Licensing-in-the-Cloud

Over the past year we’ve been working to move from a machine-based licensing model to a user-based licensing-in-the-cloud model.  There are several reasons for this move.  First, it fits better with the way our customers use our products.  They aren’t always working from one machine, sometimes moving between offices and from work to home.  With Dashboard you can log in from anywhere automatically retrieving your license.  This move to cloud-based licensing is also necessary for us to play well with the next generation of our partner’s products and services such as Autodesk RaaS.

Enterprise Deployment

We’re listening!  Many customers have dozens or even hundreds of users within their organization and admittedly, we haven’t made it very easy to deploy our solutions across an enterprise.  We’re working to change that.  Watch for a new “headless” Dashboard release for servers and easily deployable MSIs before year’s end.  We’re also building a new Admin panel inside of Dashboard where you’ll be able to see and manage licenses and content across your organization.  After that we plan to tackle centralized path management.  See, I said we’re listening!

RaaS (Rendering as a Service)

Autodesk launched it’s first labs experiment called Neon for rendering Revit models as a cloud service in 2010.  After native support for RPC was introduced in Revit and the RaaS service became official last year, our respective teams went to work on making sure all RPC Content will render in the service.  We’re about there!  Watch for full RPC-RaaS support beyond the native content that ships with Revit soon.

RPC Creator

We’ve had RPC Creator tools available for most of the 15 year history of RPC and you’ve created thousands of your own custom RPCs!  Soon you’ll be able to drop any 32-bit PNG, TIF or TGA image onto Dashboard and convert it to RPC!  This will allow you to take all of your commercial entourage libraries like those from Imagecels or Dosch Design or your own custom collection and convert them to RPC.  As RPC they become infinitely easier to use in any RPC-enabled application such as Revit or 3ds Max.  Dashboard will even automatically generate the preview images and icons for the RPC.  All you have to do is give the RPC a name and specify it’s real-world height.  No more building geometry, creating materials, adding textures, making objects ‘look-at’ cameras, blah, blah blah.  Just drag & drop and RPC takes care of the rest!

Entourage Workshop

Entourage silhouetting within Revit… that’s all we’ll say for now!

Randall Stevens

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