Enscape inside rhino some thoughts

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    HI all:thumbsup:

    i'm a enthusiast of rhino since 2008 :love:

    I heared about enscape last month for my first time, and i toke a look around to try to understand some about this plugin in the last 2 weeks. And wow, my first impression is about speed to renderize a whole heave scene in few minutes or seconds...never seen before something like that. Awesome! so congratulation for the engine it's a great rendering engine, nothing to say about this.:thumbup::thumbup::thumbup:

    But, there'are things you must improve soon, cause bring enscape3d in rhino to be a little bit annoying

    1) last release solve some incompatibilities about material, i wrote several times the word metal without success to achieve a simple metal shader, this was solved in the last enscape and works fine but there're a lot of limitations about the creation of complex shaders like curtains, wax, ceramics etc i hope you can introduce an own menu about material editor in rhino for enscape, because this is a shame, not creating a better material shader.

    2) another limit, "An heavy limit for me", is the miss of the ies support in the lights menu. OK i know is depending of rhino default engine, but like materials editor, i think a support for ies could be absolute appreciate for a professional rendering engine. i see this is solved in sketchup and i guess in revit also. why not in rhino?

    3) i found difficult use Enscape with an external window, could be possible create an inner window integrated inside the program of modelling like rhino revit or sketchup? this makes things more easy!i know a lot of people work using 2 monitor, but for those has only a screen this could be a solution.8)

    4) i think the transparency slider is not whole compatible in Enscape using r6. i try to create a curtain material, from 0 to 5% nothing of interesting happens to my material, at 6% the curtain appears completely transparent. And this is not a right behaviour. i'm wronging something?


    ok the grass system i love it.

    ok water or ocean key, love the quality of renders using them.

    i hope you take a look to these 4 points

    congratulation about your effort to create one of the best engine around.:thumbsup:

    5) emitter, when i create an emitter material isn't possible modulate the intensity of light

    6) grass, as the emitter issue, is not possible perform the amount of displacement and this could be a heavy problem if you want create a moquette or a simple carpet.

    7) is not possible, inside enscape, setting the AmbientOcclusion's distance, this could help to improve shadows, in the render image.sometime i see objects floating inside the scene.

    Hey frankissimo , thank you for the kind words and welcome to our forum! :)

    Quote from frankissimo

    1) last release solve some incompatibilities about material, i wrote several times the word metal without success to achieve a simple metal shader, this was solved in the last enscape and works fine but there're a lot of limitations about the creation of complex shaders like curtains, wax, ceramics etc i hope you can introduce an own menu about material editor in rhino for enscape, because this is a shame, not creating a better material shader.

    We actually plan to implement a dedicated Rhino Material editor as well! There is no ETA just yet, but it's coming eventually so stay tuned. :)

    Quote from frankissimo

    2) another limit, "An heavy limit for me", is the miss of the ies support in the lights menu. OK i know is depending of rhino default engine, but like materials editor, i think a support for ies could be absolute appreciate for a professional rendering engine. i see this is solved in sketchup and i guess in revit also. why not in rhino?

    Rhino doesn't allow the use of IES lights unlike Revit, which does this out of the box. SketchUp doesn't have a lighting system to begin with, so we had to design it from scratch anyways. I hope you understand that, in Rhino's case, we'd indeed have to design a very own interface just for the implementation of IES lights. We understand the demand for this feature, and I happily filed your remarks for our developers, but we must also acknowledge that Rhino users aren't as dependant of an Enscape lighting interface as the SketchUp users were back then.

    Quote from frankissimo

    3) i found difficult use Enscape with an external window, could be possible create an inner window integrated inside the program of modelling like rhino revit or sketchup? this makes things more easy!i know a lot of people work using 2 monitor, but for those has only a screen this could be a solution.

    I'll gladly file this as a feature request accordingly.

    Quote from frankissimo

    4) i think the transparency slider is not whole compatible in Enscape using r6. i try to create a curtain material, from 0 to 5% nothing of interesting happens to my material, at 6% the curtain appears completely transparent. And this is not a right behaviour. i'm wronging something?

    This is actually a design decision. Transparency values below 6% are rarely used in general and they require more performance than highly transparent materials. We want Enscape to be running as fluently as possible, so this way we avoid a scenario in which a user has a lot of barely transparent materials in his project, which eat up performance and also won't look very good because they're generally harder to render as well. This is the reason why we decided to implement a threshold.


    Further, when setting the value to 6%, does the material start to get transparent or is it actually completely transparent? Just to be clear, completely transparent would mean that the material is actually invisible. I just want to make sure this is not a bug present in Enscape. Should your material become completely transparent at 6%, could you send me a screenshot of Enscape right next to your material settings?


    Quote from frankissimo

    5) emitter, when i create an emitter material isn't possible modulate the intensity of light

    The brightness of the light emission is being determined by the brightness (= intensity) of the chosen color. So for example, if you want to have a red color with a high light emission, just choose a bright red color, if you want the light emission to be lowered, choose a darker red color.

    Quote from frankissimo

    6) grass, as the emitter issue, is not possible perform the amount of displacement and this could be a heavy problem if you want create a moquette or a simple carpet.

    I'm not sure what you mean by "perform the amount of displacement". Can you explain what you'd like to change about your grass? You can already make it taller or less straightened by using the keywords "Grass", "Tall Grass" and "Wild Grass". Maybe one of these types of Grass will be fitting for your scenario already? Please don't hesitate to also check out our dedicated Rhino materials knowledgebase here, where you'll find our Grass keywords listed again, the Rhino material parameters we support and every other supported keyword in general.

    Quote from frankissimo

    7) is not possible, inside enscape, setting the AmbientOcclusion's distance, this could help to improve shadows, in the render image.sometime i see objects floating inside the scene.

    Ambient Occlusion is not a phenomenon that occurs in real life, it's merely a technique in rendering that is often times helpful to create the illusion of physical lighting. Since we're actually simulating light rays (real-time ray tracing), based on scientific measurements, there's no need to additionally utilize techniques such as ambient occlusion.


    For further info, have a look at this forum post: AO slider

    Wow thanks for all your support.

    I m Reading and I'm unhappy only hearing about ies. Default Material support is enough for replicate 98x100 of materials in several cases of rendering interior and exterior. Perhaps The new keywords are compatible just since last version of enscape for rhino? When I toke a look at your website the available keywords were: ocean water glass metal. Not foliage or tall Grass. So very nice, I will try enscape again in future, surely because I saw a great engine very fast and with the Right quality render!using other engine I cooked an image after 2 hours,under enscape only 2 minutes! I don't know how this is possible,are you magicians? 🔮

    About transparency from 6%, I understand your point of view and I think all go right according your explanation, the material at 6 of transparency starts to be semi(half)-transparent ... And was visible like a Glass or something like that. So no bug about this behavior.💪


    I want go back at ies feature, do you think in the near future enscape became compatible with ies light illumination system? I have a lot of architect that request this feature inside their workflow... Without ies support we can't manage enscape as rendering engine. I tried also SketchUp but in comparison of rhino is a horrible cad program, slow, laggy completely another hawfull planet... But ies works inside it and this make me sad.sorry for my English.. and greetings from Italy!

    About that floating output.

    The real problem is the fact that setting-menu remains inside the rhino interface, in a separate window, if you are focused on it and make a click on it, rhino in background was recalled and came the first choice in your screen, so you must reduce it as icon in the sys tray to see the floating output working.horrible loss of time and patience.

    The brightness option for me is enough cause works fine in a lot of cases.

    But ies is a huge miss. The most important thing in an interior rendering(together materials) is the quality of illumination, some architects push their knowledge in the illumination study and lights solution, so a rendering engine for a cad program as plugin,has lost its interest just with this unpresent feature. But I'm sure you solve soon, cause rhino is a great nurbs modeller and deserve more attentions.

    Another behaviour that I encountered using enscape for some hours (I'm surely a beginner of enscape) is the quality of illumination, changing the quality of final render from its menu, in this case I often don't understand the illumination behaviour and intensity of my interior and exterior source of light.. I was thinking ok, good balance for now,when I change the slider the amount of lights seems changed and I must setup my amounts manually again.i read on the forum it s a correct behaviour cause the slider change the quality of illumination too. So I must have a mental preview of this when I want to setup a light source.

    Is a different approach then before but not so difficult to execute.

    Quote from Gadget

    Do you mean like the Light Brightness in the Advanced tab of the settings?

    Right.


    An idea - a workaround could be to use the global light brightness to dim all lights and also to set a lower skybox intensity. So, the emitters have more influence to the scene. The workaround only works for skybox environments, the Enscape sky has no intensity control.

    IES ... I hope the day will come soon when the Enscape team decide to wrote an own Rhino plugin UI. It will only be a question of time and the basic Rhino UI isn't good enough anymore. Here the light UI of Vray and AIR. The AIR plugin was developed by a single programmer, who coded an engine and a few plugins ... .

    Quote from Micha

    Some times the emitter intensity by color isn't enough. A global emitter brightness slider like exist for lights would help a lot. I suppose not so difficult to code. ;)


    A non floating Enscape output would be great. I miss it too, since I use a large 4k single screen only.

    I've filed this as a feature request accordingly, thank you for the feedback. ;)


    Regarding the implementation of IES light support into Rhino: frankissimo and Micha, it depends on the demand of this feature. Once there is enough demand, it will be developed into Enscape. I hope that you'll still be able to make use of Enscape in the meantime.

    Quote from Demian Gutberlet

    Regarding the implementation of IES light support into Rhino: frankissimo and Micha, it depends on the demand of this feature. Once there is enough demand, it will be developed into Enscape. I hope that you'll still be able to make use of Enscape in the meantime.

    sorry but this make no sense.

    if you decide to give us rhino support as plugin, why develop a plugin with such hard limitations as ies feature missing? that can help to illuminate in the right way a interior?this is a shame.

    nobody will use enscape inside rhino without IES for interior renderings...this is my opinion. For exterior is one of the best solution

    Hey frankissimo


    We generally have to set priorities and look into what is technically possible to implement. If there is a lot of demand for a particular feature, we'll implement it.


    Regarding IES lights in Rhino -> Of course we'd like to implement it as soon as possible so that our users can make use of this functionality, but Rhino already offers at least the ability to place lights, as opposed to SketchUp, so IES Lights for Rhino in particular are just not as important to lighting a scene right now as the light system was for SketchUp users.


    We take notice of every feature request we receive and upvote every corresponding already existing feature requests accordingly if someone wishes for that particular implementation. There is no voice left unheard and again, even if there is no ETA yet to when this will be implemented, if enough users demand this, it will be developed and put into Rhino.

    ok i understood your point of view and now i know how the enscape staff works, and why SU has IES support and why rhino not.


    thanks for your answer and clarification, i hope IES support comes soon in enscape for rhino :)

    IES for Rhino please. IES looks so much better and it would allow to get something like a cone angle control that is missed at the spot lights. Enscape has so much limits to work around so it could be nice if all core features would be working at least, without the users needs to beg for it.