Enscape V-Ray Compatibility

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    • Official Post

    Enscape V-Ray Compatibility


    Bridging the Gap: First Steps Towards a Unified Visualization Workflow with Enscape and V-Ray


    One significant milestone we are striving towards is to provide a unified visualization workflow to help design teams visualize and collaborate more efficiently and effectively. Today, we take one step closer to making this a reality with the initial release of Enscape to V-Ray compatibility, now available with V-Ray 6 for SketchUp and Rhino.


    Architects and designers can now easily connect their real-time design workflow in Enscape with the photorealistic rendering capabilities that V-Ray is renowned for.


    Now it’s possible to transfer an Enscape scene to V-Ray, where further refinements can be made for even higher quality visualizations. Workflows are condensed, and designers can be confident that their designs will be illustrated as initially intended.

    How does it work?


    Whatever you defined in Enscape will now render in V-Ray within the same product (e.g., all work from Enscape for SketchUp flows into V-Ray for SketchUp). Your materials, lights, and 3D assets come over as you saw them working in Enscape.


    For example, we have a scene set up in Enscape. All the assets and materials are from Enscape's Asset Library.


    Here's what the Enscape render looks like:


    And here's the V-Ray render out of the box:


    You might notice that the sky and grass are not automatically translated. This was intentional, to prevent the loss of performance.


    By changing the sky and V-Ray Fur as grass, we can create a different landscape:


    At this stage, all the V-Ray tools and features are available to push realism as far as necessary. For example, the Enscape materials can be individually transformed to V-Ray materials as desired and layered as needed, procedural clouds and grass added, physical camera adjustments and color corrections made, and entourage from Chaos Cosmos placed and even scattered for detailed landscapes.


    While this initial Enscape support is one-directional and limited to the same application, we believe it’s a giant step forward in efficiency - and it’s just the start. We are looking to improve how Enscape designers and V-Ray artists can work together across our product line, and we’ll be sure to provide you with more details as we come closer to making it available for you to try.


    What is on your wishlist for this integration? How would you make use of the best of both worlds? :)



    If you have questions about V-Ray 6 specific features, please address them on the Chaos Forum.

  • Rick Marx

    Approved the thread.
  • I have downloaded a trial of V-Ray 6 for SketchUp to make some tests and experiments.

    There seems to be a huge bug in the system. The Enscape features (grass, water effect etc) appear in the V-Ray renderer only when you're rendering on the CPU (and that makes my PC howl with temperature). If I tell V-Ray to render on my GTX1070, it's much faster but the Enscape features are missing.


    Also, can someone explain - so this features transfers only Enscape library materials? I almost never use the Enscape materials because I have my own library and resources. None of the maps that I applied for Enscape transferred to V-Ray.


    Overall, this is a great and very promising new feature. It just needs to be perfected and refined and it will be one of the best in the industry.

    • Official Post

    Thank you - Your feedback and questions have been forwarded, alongside those that you shared with me through a direct message. I'll get back to you again as soon as possible.


    Looks exiciting any news on this for Revit.

    Not yet, but as always, we'll keep you posted in case of any news.

    • Official Post

    ViggoPaulman , ghxtreme , I've got a reply from back from one of our developers. It's rather elaborate so hopefully, it's okay to share basically all of it as a quote, just slightly modified to address you directly:


    Grass - We do not handle Grass in an automatic way at this stage. We could but decided against that since the V-Ray grass alternative uses geometry for each Grass strand and tends to affect performance and memory consumption. We just wanted to avoid a negative user experience because of that. In general, in V-Ray grass should be placed and managed more carefully and we leave that to the users.


    Water - The water handling is done with a special material that we create and it should render on both CPU and GPU. However, there is one small detail that you might have caught ViggoPaulman - The waves bump amount differs between CPU and GPU. The thing is that Enscape uses local/screen space amount for its bump maps which we are also enabling. Unfortunately, this mode is not supported by V-Ray GPU. It is automatically changed to world-space and then depending on the project's unit of measure, might render differently.


    What our core compatibility developer suspects is that in this scene the water's bump renders too weak. We are currently having a discussion about that internally and a possible V-Ray Core change seems to be required if we want to address it. There is a possibility that this gets fixed soon though.


    Other things that do not render on GPU: Everything else should render accordingly, if you still run into any issues here please go into further detail.


    Rendering on the CPU "(and that makes my PC howl with temperature)" - Naturally, the CPU rendering performance depends on the hardware. The reason why you are hearing your CPU cooler so loudly while rendering is because V-Ray does his best to utilize the CPU to its full potential. You might've been aware of that anyway before, but just to make sure. :)


    "Also, can someone explain - so this features transfers only Enscape library materials? I almost never use the Enscape materials because I have my own library and resources. None of the maps that I applied for Enscape transferred to V-Ray. "


    This sounds like a file paths issue.

    Enscape has a relatively complex logic for resolving file paths (both materials and geometry assets) and we have not implemented the same on the V-Ray side. That is why we recommend you render the project at least once using Enscape in the current session before continuing your work in V-Ray. By doing it this way, we rely on Enscape to resolve any missing texture paths, serializing them in the scene material attributes.


    If this doesn't help we'll need more information on how the project is set up by you.


    Sharing the project would also help us investigate this, and in that regard please do not forget to also share the textures used in the project materials.



    Let me know if any other questions come up, we're happy to answer them.

  • Hello again Demian,


    just wanted to reach out and say thank you for the effort. Hats off to the developers too for their elaborate explanation.

    Will be waiting to see how V-Ray/Enscape collaboration evolves.


    All the best,

    Viggo