Questions about making a RPC plant library

[hdjohnson]

I have a couple of questions about making an RPC plant library and I was hoping I could get some help. Here are my questions:

1) I was using the RPC family template to create the RPC family. Is there a way to change this from an Entourage catagory to a Plant category?

I was going to use the Planting template, but it won't let you select an RPC family.

2) If I'm using more than one RPC plant, is there a way to have the symbol change to match the plant height or width?

[hand471037]

Here's what I've found, for we use RPC plants sometimes in Revit:

1. No. Or at least not as far as we've found. The RPC category give the Family the ability to be swapped at render time for a RPC item. The Planting one's the same, but it swaps in an Accurender plant instead. Even starting with one, and then changing it to the category of the other (which will work for other strange families, like Skylights being a roof-hosted family that's a Window) doesn't seem to work. So RPC plant's don't wind up Scheduling as such, unless you do a multi-category schedule that lists both plants & RPC's. And since we have no control as to that 'swapping' we can't make families that are within one category, but will swap upon render to something more complex.

2. You can make your own RPC plant family, and make it have a parametric height and width. That's what we did. Make it an instance and you can change it per-plant. You might even be able to, via nested parameters & Families, make it alter itself upon the RPC height. But I can't remember if that's a parameter or not.

One big thing to watch out for is the way that RPC's behave when you've got a lot of them, and they are layered behind each other. In order to see through them all you've got to set your Transparency Bounces one more than the number of plants, like up to 8 or 9 or so. Otherwise you'll start seeing black boxes around things that should be transparent. Also, as RPC's recede into the distance, Accurender makes them appear darker. This has been a real problem for us, for on some renderings the Trees will look dead and burnt. :/

[hdjohnson]

Thank you for the detailed response.

I was wondering would you mind posting one of your RPC plant families (I don't need any RPC data, just the file) so I can see how you went about setting it up so that the plant would change depending on the size?