Posts by Pieter

  • Revit sync with central requests constant with Enscape open

    Quote from Goncalo Pereira

    Pieter, based on your experience, if you were on our shoes, would you upgrade?

    It's a tough decision. You'll need to take a look at the release logs of 3.0 through 3.4 and decide whether the new features are worth the (very serious) issues with worksharing. Perhaps also worth noting: the latest releases seem to be less stable for us than the older 2.x series. We are definitely experiencing more crashes.


    We are using the latest version because the combination of these new features makes it worth for us:

    - the "safeframe" toggle

    - the ability to edit camera and sun position of existing views

    - the enscape material editor for Revit

    - custom asset categories

    - better reflections


    But this list is personal and it will depend on how you guys use Enscape. It also depends on how many people you typically have working in a project. If you only have one user working in Enscape concurrently, the worksharing issues aren't going to be a big deal. But if you have multiple users simultaneously trying to work in Enscape, it's...real bad.

  • Update an existing view

    Quote from gcsucci

    How did that do the trick, exactly?


    Could anyone give a step by step tutorial on updating existing views in Enscape and save them in Revit?


    thank you

    Editing views was edited in Enscape 3.4 so make sure you have that version (or newer).


    From the 3.4 release notes: "Go to View Management, select the edit icon next to the view you wish to amend, and easily change the name, visual preset, camera position using the mouse, and the sun position in one place."


    The "view management" is the binoculars icon in the top menu bar when you are inside the Enscape render window.

  • Revit sync with central requests constant with Enscape open

    Quote from cholden424

    I have a team of users that are all working towards a presentation in a workshared Revit model. They are getting constant sync with central requests when they make changes within Enscape. Example: Trying to make a view from Enscape or export a view from Enscape or change any settings - when the user tries to do any of these things it asks for them to sync with central first.

    We use Enscape constantly, and have been for the last few years, and we have not had this issue come up before. I have one user submitting feedback but am curious if anyone else has had this same issue.

    I literally have users complain about this every other day, and with good reason.


    Just yesterday I had a user tell me this in the chat:


    User: "pieter, enscape sucks big time - are they going to fix this owning issue ughhhhghghhghgg" [with 'owning' she means the constant syncing requests]

    User: "tell them we are not happyyy"

    User: "TELL THEM IT TOOK US 45 MINS TO GET ONE RENDERING DONE BECAUSE OF SYNCING TWO MACHINES"


    It's frustrating as I've called out the potential solution many times (for 2 years now) and the only answer we've gotten so far is "autodesk doesn't allow for it", while based on the Revit API documentation, the AU classes, the code samples and my conversation with Revit's software engineers, it seems like it is totally possible. Also: why is it that other plugins that store data inside Revit don't run into this?


    Sorry for the strong words, but I'm merely passing on the frustration of my users :)

  • Revit sync with central requests constant with Enscape open

    Quote from Kaj Burival

    The issue is closely tied to how Revit works when multiple people are working on the same project. Autodesk currently does not offer any functionality to share other files to collaborate on, besides the project file itself. Because there is no proper mechanism in Revit for checking files in or out, changing anything from Enscape can cause issues in Revit. There is currently no good way (on the Revit side) to auto-sync or merge these data sets across users.

    Revit's extensible storage API does provide mechanisms for this. See this AU class about methods on how to do this: https://www.autodesk.com/autod…ooperate-Worksharing-2013


    There are code samples included that deal with setting up extensible storage that plays well with worksharing.


    Long story short: the data storage needs to be split up more granularly. Separate elements for each visual preset, and attach the data related to views (isfavorite, linked visual preset, sun position) to the Revit views themselves. I think that would solve most if not all syncing issues we're having.

  • Enscape 3.0 and Revit Worksharing

    We also run into this, but it's just one of many cases where worksharing and Enscape are not working well together.


    I believe the root cause is that Enscape stores all its data on a single location (in a custom Data Schema) instead of splitting it up in smaller chunks that can be edited by multiple users simultaneously. As soon as a user makes a change to one of Enscape's settings, it automatically checks out the entire system.


    Other issues we're seeing: getting stuck in endless "user X has requested you to sync" loops, crashes, loosing settings (for example the "linked visual preset" constantly resets if we have more than one user working in a model).


    Enscape is the only render engine that should (in theory) easily allow us to work with more than one person on a single model inside Revit (different from for example Lumion or Twinmotion where as far as I am aware, that is not possible). It's so unfortunate to see this advantage is starting to fade (the issues described here were introduced 5 versions ago with 3.0) .


    At one point we will have no choice but to give up hope that this will ever gets fixed, at which point we will have to consider Enscape on equal footing with Lumion and Twinmotion when it comes to worksharing. A real shame.

  • Enscape material editor in Revit causing unnecessary model updates

    I should note that you should test this is a real production model, not a small test project. Updating times for materials in Revit go up (sometimes exponentially) with the complexity of the project. If you test this on a small sandbox project it might update so fast that you don't even notice it, but in the production model I've been working on this morning, I've spent 90% of my time for Revit/Enscape to update.

  • Enscape material editor in Revit causing unnecessary model updates

    It used to be that when we used the enscape material editor in Revit, we could tweak materials on the fly and immediately see the results in Enscape. But in the newer versions of Enscape, most changes in the material editor will cause a reloading of the scene (enscape and revit are locked while the model re-exports). This is really slowing us down when tweaking materials.


  • Custom Asset library is not scalable for Architecture firms.

    We have the same problem. There's a couple things you can do:


    1) don't give users access to the asset projects folder (or keep it in a location that the users do not know about)

    2) lobby enscape to allow for overwriting materials on custom assets on a per project basis (this is planned for enscape standard assets but unfortunately not for custom assets)

    3) what we do: you can only modify an asset if it was created by your project. The project name would then be in the asset description. All the other assets are not to be modified by anyone but the maintainer(s) of the library

  • Custom Asset library is not scalable for Architecture firms.

    Quote from Greg Rogers

    So just to reiterate. Category creation is local, and cannot be shared across a network. Assets have to be individually imported in order to be categorized and cannot read copy and pasted assets. Luckily, we can still use them but they all sit in the Uncategorized section.

    That's definitely not the case here. I can create categories fine and everyone across the network can see them. They do *not* have to be individually importer.


    I think the key here is "copy and pasted assets". Enscape keeps a ledger of the categories (with their names, icon, ...) in a central file in the asset library folder ("assetCategories.json"). There's also a file similar file in the asset projects folder (categories.json). If you copy the asset (or asset project) without the corresponding assetcategories.json file, Enscape will not recognize the category and therefor it will land under "uncategorized".


    I recommend doing the categorizing on your main master library so that the assetcategories.json and categories.json files are always up to date.