Material library, quality and custom materials

    Hi


    The new Material library is a great addition to Enscape! It has the potential to be a really handy tool to keep materials organized and easy to access.

    BUT, as it is now, many of the materials are not up to the standards that serious archviz requires. Many textures have low res heightmaps, very visible repetitions, and a very "cgi" look to them.


    And, as i've mentioned before, the library will have to be MUCH larger to cover just some of the needs we have, when choosing materials. an example: Quixel megascans has around 10.000 textures, and I STILL struggle to find just what i'm looking for very often. so, my biggest wish is still for a custom material option as well. It would be SO powerful if the material library could be a place where we could save and organize our own materials, and keep them ready whenever we need them.

    Without this option, I will still have to shuffle around for my materials, and thereby it is only fragmenting my workflow even more than before... now i have to look for materials in quixel bridge, poliigon, my own local custom library, my various collections (arroway and others) the internet, and now also the enscape library.


    Please, let the new library be a tool to streamline our workflow, and build a complete, consolidated material library that we can control ourselves.


    Here are some examples of Enscape materials vs my own materials, just to showcase that quality could be improved a lot in places:


    Roof - Enscape material library:


    Roof - custom material:


    Road - Enscape material library:


    Roof - custom material:


    pavement - Enscape material library:


    pavement - custom material (megascans):

    Herbo You are spot on. I feel like I've brought this up multiple times but the real usefulness both of the material library and the asset library could bring to enscape would be allowing users to use their own assets/materials. Am I appreciative of the library enscape provides? Yes very much so, but they are only using a small fraction of the functionality each could add to Enscape. I don't know if both features are half baked right now and the user added part will be added later maybe? To me it feel like enscape adds a half baked feature and then moves onto the next one before actually finishing that feature it initially implemented. I.E. The video editor, material editor, asset library, material library... The part that kills me is the base functionality is there and is really solid, it just needs to be fined tuned.


    P.S. Those custom materials look great.

    Hi Herbo


    thanks for your detailed feedback! That's really appreciated.


    At the moment we are defining and tweaking our textures for our upcomming release. That doesn't mean that we can fulfill these wishes in a snap. That rather means that we are working on some further and final adjustments. from our side.


    The texel tensity that we're using at the very moment is 1k on 1m which represents the same quality level then a 8k texture that is representing 8m in total. We focus on a great tileability to keep the repetitive look quite subtle. I know that it won't work for all of them. But at least for most of them. (I am up for feedback that we can share to point out any potential blind spot on a bad repetition)


    Tech Talk: The performance you reach with our textures is quite outstanding and the renderings we did with them so far will prove that they look really great. When I compare one our our Bricks (4.42MB) with another one that I can randomly get somewhere (34.8MB) it's technically almost 8 times less. While getting similar results. Some of my projects contain more then 80 Textures and when I think about 2.78 GB of textures compared to 272MB of textures - That might be easier to handle in many scenarios.



    Best Regards

    Adrian

    I agree with Herbo that adding custom materials are a critical part of making this library useful in professional production.


    I've also noticed that the quality of the materials isn't always what we nowadays have come to expect for visualizations. Herbo's examples are representative of what we've come to expect in visualizations. The enscape materials would haven been perfectly fine five years ago, but the bar has moved up a LOT in the industry, and principals are nowadays routinely sending back renderings because of poor material quality.


    I understand the technical limitations for texture size, but it seems you're playing it a bit too much on the safe side, giving that modern graphics card should be able to handle way more than what you're currently seem to be holding as a benchmark. Which makes me think: if the main limitation here not hardware, but bandwidth concerns? If so, maybe that's another argument for having the library downloadable, similar to the asset library,

    That is great news!


    I would actually prefer a local storage of a custom library, so the lack of a cloud functionality is not a problem for our office.


    What would happen when one imports a material from the custom library into a project? Would it be stored in the same (automated/hashed) folder structure that is used for the standard materials in the library?

    Organization of the materials / textures files could make or break how this is implement in firms with multiple users over a shared network. All the files the Enscape materials pull from have to reside in the same place for each user for them to load into a model correctly. With the current setup, materials would have to be imported into a model, and then moved to a central location, and relinked. I think if there was some way to more efficiently handle this, it would be a great benefit for collaborative workflows.