Posts by foggo

Another full month has passed since the last update from Demian.

This is clearly way down on the list of priorities.

Not pleased.

Quote from JDD

In the meantime, you can use the SceneRename plugin from Smustard in SketchUp, which allows you to rename and renumber all the scenes in just one click.

This free plugin is available HERE

Looks like a useful plugin, thanks, and might help when reordering alphabetically or numerically but I don't want a workaround for this.

View ordering should respect the SketchUp order. We had it and it was taken away!

Clearly a user vs developer thing.

Developers don't "use" Enscape on a day to day basis.

No offence to the devs but I am a user and it's maddening when basic functionality like this just gets tossed out on a whim.

I'm flogging a dead horse now, so I will stop moaning and hope it's fixed in the next update.

That's why I never noticed it before!

All the more reason to fix it.

Currently it's only possible to see views listed in alphabetical order under the View Management tab.

SketchUp allows you to order the views any way you like.

Can you please include the option to list views to correspond with the SketchUp scenes ordering?

Alphabetical order is absolutely useless, especially when I have dozens of views saved. Some of my projects have over a 100 views!

I have to add a letter prefix to all of my views to see them listed the way I want in Enscape, which is a waste of time and actually falls apart if I then have to insert extra views.

This small change would be a massive usability improvement to Enscape.

Also, while I'm at it, the ability to assign the linked visual pre-set to multiple views in one go rather than one at a time would literally save me hours!

I requested this feature ages ago but I was told it's not possible.

You'll have to navigate through your views(scenes) in Enscape to have the visual settings update.

Also, being able to arrange the Enscape views to match SketchUp would be very useful. We're stuck with alphabetical for now. A quick workaround would be to prefix your SU scene names with ABCD...
It's slower and like you mention, the View management tab takes up a lot of space.

I'm sure Enscape can make the View Management tab an independent "pop out" similar to Vis Settings, materials, Asset library, batch rendering etc.???

The video editor is even more annoying as it takes up real estate on the left and the bottom of the Enscape window.

Come to think of it, pop out windows for everything please?!

Anyone else having an issue with blurry, low res icons and dialogues in the Enscape viewer?

And yes I'm using the latest Enscape version and my AMD drivers are up to date.

Well done!

Watch out though, delivering that much in such a short timeframe might become the expected norm!

Personally, I've learned to "hold back" a bit to temper expectations. Things won't always go that smoothly.

PS. this is more of a comment on our industry than Enscape.

Thanks for your reply Demian.

On the next project I will just use Enscape to create the views and assign the visual pre-set at the same time. It looks like I'll have to stop using the SketchUp FoV setting to avoid the conflicting FoV issue. No big deal, it was just how I've always worked. Plus I will only use batch rendering from now on for the sake of consistency.

I will have to navigate around more in Enscape now but that is fine as I recently got a Spacemouse.

I'll start by addressing the perspective/2 pt perspective/SketchUp camera suggestions. I don't use 2 pt,, only perspective camera in SketchUp and Enscape is set to perspective as well. I'm puzzled about the 140FoV setting you mention as well Demian. Anyway, this is not the issue.

Let me explain my process of how I create my views.

Historically I have always created scenes in SketchUp as that's what I've been doing for the last 16 years! And I have found that for my purposes, setting SketchUp's FoV setting to 70deg is a good starting point. I will start Enscape now and leave it syncronized with SU.

For the views in my original post I used a custom resolution of 1600x1050 assigned to the current view pre-set. I will then create my scenes using SketchUp (not Enscape).

Before you know it, I've got 80 or so scenes all created as described. Then there's inevitably some tweaking done to the model, some people added etc. I will then do a few screenshot renders once I'm happy with the model. NOTE I have left the syncronize views on as I see no reason to unsync at this point.

Great, now I've got a pile of views with which I want to do a "final" render. Batch render is the obvious next step.

Hang on, I have to assign the view pre-set to all of the views (I've already shared my thoughts on that)

2 hours later I'm ready to batch render. I do so. Syncronize views is still on. Shouldn't matter right?

But they don't match the preliminary screenshot views I created earlier. They're cropped as I mentioned in my OP.

So I try unsyncronizing and I notice that Enscape's FoV setting changes from 70deg (Vertical) to 80 deg ( horizontal).

Not even going to try to make sense of that. Try the batch render on a couple of views, still not matching.

I click this little button, the FoV changes to 90deg (horizontal) still the batch views don't match.

So I give up and end up rendering each view one at a time with the screenshot render option.

Of course now I have to tweak the model and need to re-render the entire set of views. Now I'm determined to get this batch rendering to work, so I manually fiddle with that number and arrive at 93.675 to get an exact match. It's a head scratcher and was a bit time consuming but I got there in the end. I'm stuck with it, it works and is the only solution to get the 80+ views matching the screenshots which I already produced as a prelim set.

So what should I be doing differently to avoid this? Create all of my views from Enscape? Avoid using SketchUp's FoV setting and rely on the Enscape one? Leave synchronize views off? This is counter-intuitive as Enscape is the plug-in and should be the slave to SketchUp. I know one thing, I will definitely avoid using the screenshot render option in future and just use batch, even for single renders.

Thats' interesting, cheers.

Certainly explains why I arrived at that figure.

Still don't understand why I should have to manually input into the FoV setting to achieve the same results between batch and screenshot.

I'm amazed that no one else seems to be bothered by this.

Since no one could offer any advice I decided to mess about with the Field of View settings since it seemed to me to be the likely cause of my issue.

All of my SketchUp scenes have a FoV of 70 deg. I use this on pretty much every SU scene I create.

The only way I could get Batch Rendering to achieve the same result as a screenshot was firstly, disabling view sync and then setting the FoV to 93.675(Horizontal) in Enscape's Visual Settings which then updated the pre-set assigned to the views.

That number was arrived at by trial and error and makes no sense to me whatsoever.

This can't be the way it's meant to work?!

BTW. Assigning visual pre-sets one view at a time is just painful. Try doing this with 80+ views. Can I please request that the developers look to find a way to enable assigning pre-sets to multiple views at once? I'm begging you!

Can anyone suggest something?

Does it have something to do with the Field of View or Safe Frame or Synchronze Views?

I need to create about 80 renders and can't face having to do them again one at a time!!

In the two renderings below I created the one on the left using the screenshot button. This is the desired result.

There is a visual pre-set which is set as current as per the Visual Setting box screen grab.

When I render that same view using Batch render which has that same visual pre-set linked to the view (as you can see below in the View Management screen grab) I get a different result.

It is cropped, or zoomed in slightly.

The same output settings are being used, so why are they not the same?

This has always confounded me and means that I cannot use batch rendering, which would be a great time saver.

It really depends on having updated drivers I think.

I'm using 3.0 with an AMD Radeon Pro WX7100 GPU and just released drivers for a full week now and SketchUp/Enscape is working like a swiss watch.

Maybe Nvidia need to update their drivers for Enscape 3.0?

I think it's the second option. Basically a file that you can send to someone so that when they open it, they see a static view but with the interactive slider bar to change the time of day. So when they slide it the sun travels across the sky just as it does on the features page I took a screenshot of. I suppose the time parameters would be set when creating it.

Fair enough it's not feasible, just thought it would be an impressive thing to send to a client.

I was checking out the Enscape features page and I was really taken with the window that allows you to use a slider to change the time of day.

In fact, all of the options there which allowed me to change the view with a slider were fantastic.

This would be an amazing output feature.

To be able to send a "stand alone slider" view to a client which has this functionality would be brilliant.

Is this something that could be possible for future versions?

I'm finding the 3.0 view management it a bit slower compared with the previous version. But, I am extremely happy that we can finally see the visual settings preset applied in the Enscape viewer when switching views. This is a major improvement!

However, this only works when selecting views in the Enscape viewer. Can it be made to work when toggling through scenes in the SketchUp window?

Also, another huge improvement would be the ability to select multiple views at once to assign visual presets. Is this something that can be achieved?

I know it's always been this way but it it is really time consuming to have to assign a preset to one view at a time. I usually have dozens of views that I want to use the same settings on.

Found it. It's a 2 step process now.

I don't seem to be able to render elevations anymore.

In June 2020 I was able to render elevations with whatever the current version was at the time.

I have had to re-visit those saved views as there have been changes to the design, but when I render using take a screenshot, all I get is a white box.

I have seen that this is a known issue with v2.9 and there is a supposed "workaround" but this means I have to recreate the views, which is a problem as I just wanted to render and do a quick Photoshop edit.

Recreating means the views will not matchup perfectly.

I will have to install the old version to do this which is not ideal to say the least.

Can you please fix this issue?

I've installed the latest version and I was still having the problem above.

However, I think I have found a solution.

The project with the views I am having this problem with was created originally just over 2 years ago and therefore the view settings were also created with whatever the current version of Enscape was at the time.

This was obviously well before there was such a thing as batch rendering or even saving view settings in the SU project.

So when the ability to save presets in project came about in later versions of Enscape I used the legacy setting import function and then created presets saved to the project with them.

This is what is causing the problem because I tried making new view presets from scratch using default settings and tested the screenshot vs batch method and it works fine.