We would love to change the way the stand-alone exports work. As many companies, we have a zero-trust security policy in place. We generally don't allow unsigned .exe files to be run by users and have little to no easy way to allow the unsigned executable to be whitelisted.
At a base level, it would be great if the exe exports were signed.
Even better, create a stand-alone player/viewer which plays .enscape files.
Kind regards,
Jonah
Anyone interested in this topic may want to vote for an Enscape API here:
Enscape open API - Feedback & Questions - Enscape Community Forum (enscape3d.com)
+1
Thanks for counting our votes.
We often do design work in one platform, rhino or sketchup, then documents in revit. Or we develop a Revit model, then do all rendering in Rhino or Sketchup where we can add detail that would overwhelm a Revit model. My colleague has another thread here documenting this problem. We have a Rhino modle with hundreds of Enscape assets. Capturing their transforms is easy. As is their Block Name which we translate into Enscape Asset ID from the files in the asset library. Then, using the Revit API, we can go about recreating Enscape Families in Revit with the appropriate Enscape GUIDS attached... It works... for the most part.
But I would much rather do this with an Enscape API on both ends, or at least some export/import tools to transfer Enscape assets between platforms.
Re-linking Assets
JonahHawk, could you share a little bt more about your animated custom assets? What types of source files / Animation settings did you use to get it to work with the Enscape wind settings, etc.?
Did you bring them in through the Blender workflow or 3DS max/Babylon? How long were your loop animations?
Thanks
I did not animate anything. The animation is automatically applied by Enscape to any Foliage category.
But to answer your questions, I used 3dsMax/Babylon.
Pieter,
Did you install the latest update for Enscape? I have a custom library of almost a 100 assets, and am a little hesitant to make the switch :I
I have installed 2.8. The fun surprise <spoiler> is that my custom assets in Vegetation category blow in the wind just like Enscape assets!
Forgot to answer this question: I can definitely to that, as soon as we can figure out a good UX/UI for it, that isn't too crazy to implement. Easiest for me would be to be a button that pops up a dialog that lets you select max resolution, and then any images that are above that treshold are downsampled to that size? Do you think that would be valuable?
It would certainly help many people who don't have the means to batch process the image assets themselves. Reduce the size as well as the color depth.
We were handling other meta data via a simple text file in each asset folder, adding that data as Tags/Description/Bounding Box sizes etc. The Babylon exporter does not include any of that data.
I would also love to see the opacity/transparency added as Enscape implements it.
That all makes good sense. We are weighing several factors here. Especially in a work-from-home environment. Laptop, remote desktop, ISP bandwidth... There are also differing needs/preferences per platform. For some assets, a bounding box is all we want in Revit, but in Rhino or SketchUp, a proxy mesh representative of the asset is preferred.
I would love if Enscape added functionality to switch between proxy mesh shapes; tetrahedron, cube, proxy mesh, original mesh. Similar to VRayProxy.
Given that individual workstation hardware can vary wildly, we are toying with the idea of a benchmark scene and some sort of diagnostics app like FRAPS to get a sense of how asset complexity affects rendering speed on various hardware.
Pieter
Thank you for the continued work on this.
What are your thresholds for the warnings?
I had a little feedback from Enscape support. They specified 40k triangles as an upper limit of any of their built-in assets. And for texture maps, they go pretty low with some; as low as 64x64 and the majority at 256, all 8bit color depth.
I wonder if we could develop some sort of rule of thumb for texture size. Pixels per surface area, for example.
Are you planning to implement a batch processor function in your tool?
Thanks a lot Pieter for your time indeed while our developers are busy working on this feature to become available natively.
Demian Gutberlet
In the meantime, is there a possibility we could look at all of the gltf extensions Enscape is using as well as the aspects of GLTF you are ignoring? The babylon exporter for 3dsmax only gets us part way to where we need. It ignores opacity/cutout for example. We are working on adding those textures using JSON. It would be great to get a complete map of Enscape's version of GLTF. Similar to this diagram:
https://github.com/KhronosGrou…s/gltfOverview-2.0.0b.png
Thank you,
Jonah
I am downsampling my texture sizes yes. The new creator will now at least warn you when you have assets with large textures.
Would people be interested in a button in the asset creator to downsample the textures automatically? And if so, to what resolution?
Pieter,
Thank you for the quick reply.
I am writing a script to batch process many assets. I am downsampling large files and also converting filetypes to png (from tiff or other formats that GLTF ignores). So those two options would be great but not necessary for me.
Another question regarding Opacity maps.
How do I make them work? The Babylon exporter seems to ignore maps in the Opacity slot. I read that we can use the Alpha of the Diffuse map for Babylon.js, but does Enscape read this? Is there a flag I need to add to the GLTF?
Is anyone actively optimizing assets when converting them?
I am converting assets in 3dsMax and want to downsize many of the texture maps used in asset models we've purchased. It is easy enough to do. I'm just wondering what a comfortable maximum image size might be.
With VRay and a workstation with a lot of RAM, bitmap image size doesn't matter that much. But for Enscape, I think it is important that both the polygon count and bitmap dimensions be optimized for GPU VRAM usage.
I realize the quality of the appearance depends on the distance from the camera to the asset and/or the size of the asset relative to the rendered image.
Performance will depend on hardware...
I'd love to hear other's thoughts.
p.s. For those having issues with Opacity mapping, the only image formats accepted for Opacity are png, dds and tga.
Good find. I've installed this geforce opengl tool on a few computers so far and it opens Enscape without hanging. I've not tried it on large or complex models.
Thanks for the feedback. Can you give me a quick sense of the GPUs on those workstations where this tool has helped? are they geforce or quadro? Models? Updated drivers?
We have had a range of issues with some users. So it is hard to make definitive claims. But one thing I think I am seeing is our security blocking the installation of needed VC++ Redist packages. We update drivers, log in with admin accounts and install/update Enscape, but still problems persist for some users. Given that it works flawlessly for me and several other users, I am not blaming Enscape at all. I'd just like to narrow this down to a few things we can do to try and solve this.
Thanks for your input, BSG
Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay sane!
Jonah
I have no problem with MS Remote Desktop and Enscape. Quadro P5000. We have P2000s in many workstations as well. We are getting a mix of errors and problems now that 750+ people are working from home.
Has anyone here tried the OGL acceleration tool for GeForce GPUs from NVidia?
https://developer.nvidia.com/designworks
It seems targeted at just this issue.
QuoteAccelerate Windows Remote Desktop
Game developers and content creators all over the world are working from home and asking us to help them use Windows Remote Desktop streaming with the tools they use.
We've created a special tool for GeForce GPUs to accelerate Windows Remote Desktop streaming with GeForce drivers R440 or later.
Download and launch the executable as administrator on the Windows Desktop where your OpenGL application will run. A dialog will confirm that OpenGL acceleration is enabled and if a reboot is required.
We are a large firm with tons of Enscape licenses.
We are definitely keeping an eye on D5. The lighting quality is excellent.
Granted, the demos are likely run on a high-end RTX card, but clearly they have a good thing going.
