Posts by georgi913

It seems like the merger is only in name right now. Corona Render immediately benefited from their merger with Chaos, but then again V-Ray and Corona were somewhat similar, so I'd say it was easier for Chaos software engineers to help Corona with things and implementations to make the two engines more compatible (or rather Corona more compatible with V-Ray, as V-Ray was way more advanced at the time of the merger).

Enscape UI designers can only learn from Chaos's UI experience, which is tremendous and spanning through so many software packages that you can easily lose count.

Twinmotion follows the trend of "early access" games, where amateur software developers come together to develop a rendering engine (only they don't write much, as it's all on the back of giants, in that case Unreal Engine). What's bad is that it tries to simplify the UI for everyone, but that kills any features that make render engines powerful. Simplicity is good but not at the expense of cutting short features and important tools. Many other software packages, be it Blender or other seemingly popular render engines like D5 Render, always seem intuitive and cool, but once tried by a veteran user, there are fundamental tools that are omitted (usually due to ignorance of the developers or convoluted roadmaps) that makes the software nearly useless if not counterintuitive (for the veteran user that is).

My wish for Enscape is give us more frequent updates than we currently get, have a robust roadmap that lets us know what we will receive every 1-2-3 months, and a future goal that says Chaos will help with the software development in order to make Enscape more comparable with the tools that Corona and V-Ray have.

Thank you everyone so far. Just to note - I have changed the title of the thread to be a bit more clear of what's being proposed.

I hope the suggestions are easy enough to do (from a developer's perspective) and someone from the dev team could confirm if there's plans to make similar improvements in the near future.

Short term - I think the most important thing from the above is the ability to select and change multiple views at once (since you can somewhat easily duplicate views manually in Revit).

I've planned to do this for a while. Forgive me if these have been suggested before, however I decided to take the suggestions a step further and include UI mockups, as to help clarify to the devs what we need as users.

Very often I find myself struggling with Enscape's interface, for Revit in particular, and even more particularly, comes from the way I use the softwares - I use Enscape & Revit to show a lot of proposed options with a lot of images. The projects I work on can have easily anywhere between 2 to 8 options, which in turn will need at least 4 to 8 images to show each option from various views (interior, exterior, isometric). If I had these features, it will make my life a lot easier and the user experience much more fluid.

The reason I called them low hanging fruits is because I believe these are very simple to do, yet pack a lot of punch in terms of Quality of Life for the users.

View Management

• Ability to select multiple views and change their linked visual preset at once. That would be really useful when you duplicate large amount of views and you need to change their linked visual preset at the same time.
  UI mockup:
  
• (no UI mockup for this one) Duplicated views should retain their visual preset:
  Right now when you duplicate views they don't retain the visual preset and you need to manually apply them. This gets hard when you have 5 design options with 10 views each with interior and exterior visual presets. I propose - when you duplicate views from within Revit (my main software, but for all I know the same could be done in SketchUp, etc.) the duplicated view to retain the visual preset that was applied to the original view.
  
• Duplicate views from within View Management interface. This is peculiar to Revit perhaps, as it it's one of the few software packages which doesn't provide ability to duplicate multiple views out of the box (you can duplicate single views, but for multiple, you will need plugins or Dynamo scripts... ). Suggestion should work for both single and multiple views.
  

Sun/Sky/Clouds - Ignore Cloud Option & Manually move clouds.

• Tickbox to allow sun to pass through any clouds (i.e ignore the clouds). Right now if you want to show clouds in your scene, you get very unpredictable lighting as clouds block the sun with different time settings and different wind speeds. To make it a bit more consistent - we need a tickbox to override shadows completely.
  Additionally - 1 slider to manually move the clouds, irrespective of time of day and wind speed (right now we can stop the clouds by putting wind speed to 0%, but no ability to manually move the clouds).
  

Since the thread is partially hijacked talking about QoL fixes, how about another "easy" one:

When duplicating views inside Revit (I haven't tested this in SketchUp, if someone could confirm if it's the same) they don't retain the view preset of the original view.

Imagine if you have 10 views, but you need to duplicate them 5 times to show 5 different options to your client. Because preset views are not transferred, now you have to manually set up each individual duplicated view, and it's just not a fun task let me tell you.

We need to make a list of what's called "low hanging fruits" quality of life features. Such features should require minimal amount of developers time but provide huge amounts of improvement. Also, I propose the following format of making suggestions, make the suggestion but also try to give a simple explanation as to how you expect it to work and how easy/hard you think it will be for the developers to make it, I can start:

View Management

1. Ability to select multiple views and change their linked visual preset. That would be really useful when you duplicate large amount of views and you need to retain their linked visual preset. Right now when you duplicate views they don't retain the visual preset and you need to manually apply them. This gets hard when you have 5 design options with 10 views each with interior and exterior visual presets.

Material Management

1. Take note of how VRay for Revit did it - you can override Revit materials (or select materials to override) with another material. What this allows is to quickly create a new visual preset (similar to how we have Styles, but we're limited to White, Polystyrol and Light view) let's say you want to create a special style to show your model as a maquette/physical model, but you can make it as detailed as you like.

Further to that, it allows to make quick material options. For example, you can floor boards in one view, in next view you override the floor boards to be ceramic tiles, in yet another view you override them to be carpet. This will be a HUGE time saver as you no longer need to duplicate the floor, apply 3 different materials and then hide them in their respecting views.

Sky/Cloud Management

1. Really simple - tickbox to allow sun to pass through any clouds. Right now if you want to show clouds in your scene, you get very unpredictable lighting as clouds block the sun with different time settings and different wind speeds. If you want to make it a bit more advanced, make it into 1 tickbox to override so shadows pass completely and 1 slider to make the change the opacity of clouds. We have the density/variety setting for this (kind of) but it's too unpredictable.

2. Slider for moving clouds irrespective of time of day and wind speed.

Camera Management

1. Ability to export/import camera location. This way you can do camera matching in SketchUp and import the camera location into your Revit project and continue work. If anyone wonders how that is possible, it's very simple - export your Revit as .dwg and import into SketchUp (now you're working to the same coordinate system), do camera matching and simply export the camera location through the View Management tab. We already have the Create View, surely Enscape knows the coordinates/view angles of all views and can easily export them to a text file.