Posts by Pieter

I agree with both all Alex_5278 's points:

- the UI overall was successful on most fronts

- but some changes, like missing thumbnails, always-geometry-reload (and, for me at least, auto-saving of the settings) are breaking changes that are proving so counterproductive we needed to roll back

Linking to a native should be be optional, and you should be able to pick what you want to link from the native view and what is saved in Enscape's view directly:

"link to view" dropdown + 3 checkboxes for: geometry / time of day / camera position. Once you have that, geometry should only be reloaded for views that have "geometry" checked. All the other views would just load from the active Enscape view.

Quote from architect_andy

The thing that I'm trying to figure out at the moment is how to change the assetID parameter in revit. In other words, how to trick enscape into thinking one asset is another. I can't seem to figure out how to access this parameter, or if it is even possible (let alone recommended).

This part is relatively straightforward with dynamo. I think all you need is add a parameter with the right name and write the GUID of the asset to it. So in short:

1) extract position, rotation, scale and GUID of each asset and write them to a single csv file

2) find a way to write the placeholder geometry for each unique asset (GUID) to a geometry file (like .obj)

3) using dynamo, make a family for each GUID (add correct type parameters + write values to them + load in geometry

4) using dynamo, place an instance of each family according the locations/rotations saved in the csv

Step 3 should be relatively straightforward, as there should be many (non enscape related) examples online.

Step 4 to me seems the trickiest. As you probably want to host the families on the relevant levels. So maybe you would need to iterate a bit over placement and host them to the nearest (lower) level and then update their elevation offset.

I think in theory this should work, but it's going to be a complicated graph.

Can you share your setup? Are the two projects modeled in the same coordinate system (is the origin of revit model = origin of the rhino model)?

There's should be no need to run Enscape while rhinoinside is running. You could run the entire setup before launching Enscape.

Quote from jtubb

Can the library be saved on to a server? I don't have the Harddrive space for the Enscape library.

If you mean a local server: yes as long as it's mapped to a drive it should work fine.

Quote from Demian Gutberlet

You can also always right-click on any of your settings and then "Duplicate" - this should be what you're looking for?

Based on the number of times a similar tread has been posted here, and based on the user feedback in my office, I think it would be more intuitive that when you hit 'new settings' the current settings are used. You could then add a button "reset to default setting" somewhere.

Quote from Tim

The trade-off, of course, being performance on a network drive vs local storage. Maybe that's the concern for the developers?

Maybe, but I don't think that concern is justified. Generally the local networks are so fast you would barely notice the difference between having the textures locally or on the network drive. All the offices I ever worked for/with had their textures on network drives.

And now with services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc you can have large folders marked as "offline" (cached locally) so that Enscape doesn't have to wait for the files to download.

For many offices (the majority?) collaboration is an integral part of design work. Enscape should factor that in.

..

up

I feel this is one of these things that people will not realize/report is an issue during betatesting (because you typically don't test beta's with a larger group on a real project), and will thus only be flagged after release.

Doesn't mean it isn't very important.

Quote from Demian Gutberlet

no forecast as of yet

We had the same thing when we tested 3.0

The new previous release notes included this:

Quote

• Note: Textures that are being applied as part of any imported material package are currently placed in a Temp directory. This will be changed in subsequent Previews and will ultimately be available for the final 3.1 release as configurable option for the user.

Given that the new Enscape release will have a material library and the ability to export/import materials (great!!), the way it deals with texture paths is VERY important. The quote above sounds a little bit like every user will have a single option where to store the textures of imported materials (presumably coming from either the new material library or imported from a .matpkg file).

My concern: we have 50 users working on 20 projects concurrently. A user could be working on several different projects a day. We want to keep the texture folders for each project separate (so users don't accidentally edit/overwrite material of another project + to keep the cache size of the folders reasonable + to facilitate archiving + ...). I'm afraid users will forget to switch their folder, and thus start putting texture maps all over the place. And it's of course very important that these textures land in a place that is available for everyone on the team (so not on the desktop/temp/...).

For these use cases, would it be possible to add an option "ask every time" so that users are prompted where to save the textures when they import materials?

Quote from andybot

The problem with this new workflow for Enscape 3 is that if I make an adjustment to test out some settings, I lose the original setting. This new way, you have to save a new setting first BEFORE tweaking any changes. I'd rather save a setting AFTER making tweaks once I'm happy with it. I'm still not happy with this change and I am waiting for a better workflow.

This is a very important point. The new system discourages experimentation, and I think that's very unfortunate.

This is the main reason why were are holding back with updating to 3.0

Quote from GordonBuildingDesign

3rd party app developers are generally not in the know prior to Autodesk releases.

Autodesk does inform third party developers about new releases and sometimes even provides the SDK's before the release. Still, it's understandable that Enscape needs a few weeks to get a stable version out.

Both the manual method or the automatic 'link family' are saved in the family (and thus in the file). No need to repeat for every user.

If you want this in every project, the best option is to set this up in your Revit template.

You can also do it manually. Place an asset, and look at its type parameters: there are 3 parameters that Enscape uses to make the asset system work:

Just create those 3 parameters on your custom families and make sure to copy the value. (be exact in the naming). Then enscape will start replacing your custom family with the asset.

This is exactly what the "link revit family to asset" functionality does, but if you are designing your template it can help to know what is happening in the background.

As far as I'm aware this is not yet possible.

In theory you could write a custom plugin to safe an Enscape material in sketchup out to a matpkg file (Enscape.s file format for materials that can be importerd in the asset editor) but you would have to know the sketchup api and how to access custom attributes and it's going to be a fair bit of work.

I agree that the previous ux had a few benefits over the new version. For me that doesn't necessarily mean bring the old system back, but perhaps improve the current design to bring back some of the benefits of the old system:

- The thumbnails make it easier to find views

- I agree the view list is a bit cluttered. Maybe showing the icons on the same line as the view names would help.

- Not reloading geometry unnecessarily was a big plus of the old system

Material settings that are specific to Enscape (and that don't natively exist in Sketchup) will not be exported by Sketchup's native .obj exporter.

+1

Oh and a better color picker with a color sampler so I can sample colors from reference pictures! That would be so helpful.