Posts by eliotbnz

Hi all,

We are encountering an issue with our designers starting to way outstrip their workstation's (T2000 GPU...yeah, I know) capabilities, mainly through using a lot of vegetation (primarily the Globeplant "low poly" assets) on enormous scenes. As anyone who has worked at a large company knows, having custom specified machines for individual users isn't an option. We will be upgrading to the new GPU range later this year but I suspect they will still have issues with these scenes.

Hoping someone can point me to some REALLY low poly assets/billboards (if they work in Enscape)? Or suggest a workflow tweak?

Personally, I think they have been seduced by Enscape a bit much - spending more time rendering and fixing problems than actually designing, without understanding its technical limitations. Tale as old as time...

Quote from Pieter

Of course this feature will work for some people. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find any feature where you can't find people advocating opposite sides. But both on this forum as in my office most people seem to come out against it.

Also keep in mind that what I'm proposing is having the option to discard changes. The only thing it would change for your office is that you'd occasionally have to click 'save' (ENTER) on a popup dialog when you try to exit a settings window with unsaved changes. Is that really such an unreasonable compromise?

Your idea seems fair enough - as with the latest change, it doesn't seem a big deal so we can all crack on and go back to worrying about why our mirrors don't reflect properly

Our company has adapted to the auto save approach to presets no sweat, and given the way designers seem to work (seat of their pants, especially in a large firm with insane deadlines), it suits them well. I don't know how many times I've had one of our architects/interior designers come to me asking how to get the images looking the same again... I suspect this is the idea behind the change - it suits the "everyman" rather than the clued up visualizer who actually takes their time to get a proper workflow locked in.

Quote from pete_nz

Yeah, the controllers are super choppy. My controllers are present (along with the performance issues) from the start, so I haven't experienced the scene going from performant - to poor performance like you have you. Demian Gutberlet, I can open a project and send new report if that helps. We don't use Enscape much at the moment, we are using UE4 (and testing the preview of UE5) for VR and general vis, since for our purposes the workflow effort is comparable and the baked lighting workflow + DLSS 2.1 means high res VR is more a feasible.

Interesting. Our performance issues are sorted - it's actually the headset being useless now. We have actually gone the other way - Unreal is great but gee it's some serious work with constant design changes

Quote from jtubb

I've encounter this but not from a geometry stand point. General from lighting, material, or engine updates.

• Did you change the material properties for the glass?
• It's super hard to tell what the sun's direction is in either shot. Kind look right to left for the bottom is that the same for the top.
• Were both renders done in the same version of Enscape - 3.0.2?

Everything the same in both versions

Quote from Demian Gutberlet

I'm afraid you may have to play around with the scene a bit, in other words try section planes for example to cut out what you don't need of the scene, anything which may not be directly visible during that certain perspective for example. That may at least provide you with more faithful reflections then, if the main cause as to why only a part is displayed is caused by the overall scene complexity.

One more question - does hardware make any difference here? eg; will my 3090 equipped machine deal with this problem better than a workstation laptop? Or is this bottleneck hardcoded at the Enscape end?

Quote from Demian Gutberlet

I'm afraid you may have to play around with the scene a bit, in other words try section planes for example to cut out what you don't need of the scene, anything which may not be directly visible during that certain perspective for example. That may at least provide you with more faithful reflections then, if the main cause as to why only a part is displayed is caused by the overall scene complexity.

Tried deleting large swathes of geometry, to no avail. Thanks for replying regardless.

Hopefully I speak for other users from Oceania/South Pacific/Australasia when I plead from some people representative of our part of the world. The fact there are seemingly zero Pacific races represented is a tough pill to swallow and something we get criticised for all the time.

I understand your hands are tied by the efforts of those you source the models from... but perhaps a side word to them wouldn't go astray.

Quote from Demian Gutberlet

eliotbnz , first off, in case they are not confidential, can you please share a few screenshots with me of those said reflections?

Generally, in summary: "our algorithm prefers to select those objects that have the most impact on the lighting in the scene, so sometimes certain elements (especially highly detailed, small objects) might not be visible in this simplified version of the scene." - This may not be extremely helpful so it would also be good to see the reflections directly to perhaps help with that.

Thanks for the reply Demian

Top is original, bottom is current. The gold facade you see reflected in the top image is contained within the view frustum (I have cropped the image for confidentiality reasons) in both scenes, yet now only appears in the older file. They pop in and out of reflections as you move around the scene. They are fairly simple geometry - perhaps 20 faces per panel? But quite large, they space inter-floor so are around 3 metres tall each.

Hey team,

I'm aware of Enscape's shortcomings in the area of screen space reflections - however, we've recently moved a project through to another stage of design, and as the complexity has increased, we are now suffering such poor reflections that the images are nigh unusable. I have tested with earlier model versions, and they remain working fine... so seemingly a model complexity issue (likely Revit to SKP geometry).

I am wondering if there are any known methods to help address this? Am I wasting my time in setting up certain layers/tags within SKP to hide geometry in certain views to try and restore reflections? Does anyone have any tips for tracking down rogue geometry that may be causing issues? Will texture sizes be part of the problem too? Enscape is an incredible tool regardless, but this issue is cropping up time and again for us.

Running Enscape 3.0.2 on dual xeon with RTX3090. Scene runs impeccably on this machince at ultra. Have tried RTX on/off with no result.

Cheers all

Quote from Race Padilla

another example

without AO with AO

JuJitsoup  eliotbnz THANKS to this thread i founded this technique

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Great result!

Quote from Paul Russam

This is a link to a 64Mb zip file that contains ALL the thumbnails of the Enscape assets.

Each PDF is one of the Library categories (Accessories, Animals, Construction etc)

The filenames listed in the PDF are the names within the Library so if you find one you/your colleagues like in the PDF you can easily type 'Desk Lamp 13' for example in the Asset Lib to get to it quickly.

All Enscape asset thumbnails as of May 2021 - (Zip file on OneDrive):

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkhTpxcdiHsSsbFZ912fo_NkNVIzpA?e=zBG38d

Sample Screenshot of the Lighting pdf:

I worked out how to extract the thumbnails and then a friend of mine (thanks Joe) automated it so that it processed all of them. I'm not entirely comfortable sharing how I did it as it involves poking around a bit in the Enscape files so please don't ask

I asked and got permission to post these.

When the Library next gets updated I'll do the process again ... That is unless Enscape themselves come up with a better solution.

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Legend - really appreciate this.

Quote from JuJitsoup

Hi, I'm using Enscape with SketchUp 2021 and have a building which needs to be faced with a texture such as this. I've tried a number of times but can't get anything close to this.

Does anyone know how you would go about rendering a surface to look like this?

What are you struggling with?

Here's a quick test I did - while the general texture colour is wrong, I'm guessing you can't quite get the depth of the formwork to come across?


I used a megascans surface for this, and as is the case with almost all my megascans materials, I overlay the AO pass on the albedo pass in photoshop in multiply mode. I adjust opacity to suit, just enough to get the micro shadow detail that Enscape can't manage to achieve. This is especially important when using displacement, as I am here, because the current method in Enscape is problematic for getting surface details (usually achieved with normal/bump map in offline renderers). This will be crucial in getting that woodgrain to come across, though it won't be quite as good.

Other option - model it!

Hopefully this makes sense to you

Quote from Tim

Fun software so far. Went ahead and purchased a license before the trial ended. So much to learn, but here's my first scene, using only built-in Scatter and Enscape proxy assets.

Used Artisan (trial) for sandbox terrain modeling. I'm still struggling with producing natural edge transitions- i.e. the pathway/grass.

Are you using the Skatter presets for your grass? They have one for edges and for large areas. You'll see that the built in Skatter grass for each of these presets have a patch of grass to suit - a small one for the edges, and a larger one for the general area preset.

I use these presets, but then replace the Skatter grass with my own, and I have created two versions of my own grass to match the dimensions of the Skatter grass. Works great.

Just a bump for this - our VR machine is quite capable (RTX2080Ti, updated drivers, 8 core CPU, 64gb RAM).

Running SKP2021 and Enscape 3.0.1, with an HP Reverb G2.

I have noticed that the headset runs the scene on medium quality, at 90hz, all settings default absolutely beautifully, but as soon as the controllers become active in the scene, the frame rate drops massively, making the experience unusable. I have dropped the resolution to 35%, and it becomes slightly usable, but renders the G2 slightly irrelevant.

Any ideas appreciated, currently we are not able to use VR in a meaningful manner.

You're right - it is a little strange, and different to the old workflow. Once it clicks for you, hopefully it's quite nice to use.

When you create a preset from scratch, it will set everything to default. You will see the "Custom Preset" option in there however, and this is the key. This is where your changes you are making are being saved when you are starting from scratch with presets.

So, two workflows.

Either, at the very start, click "Create Preset", name it accordingly (scene/camera for example) and make your changes and it will save on the fly.

Or, just open the presets, start adjusting away (it will default to the Custom Preset at the beginning of a project) and then duplicate the "Custom Preset" and rename it (eg; to the name of the view/camera).

In either case, you can then link the preset to the scene in View management, making the loading of presets automated.

Enscape 3.0 automatically saves changes to presets as you work - this can be a little dangerous, but makes sense when you consider how a lot of architects and designers work - aka frenetically and with little care for file management.

Looks like he maybe downloaded the specular workflow option - looking at that shader on the website, the specular workflow albedo is very dark, so would need to be inverted to get a close result. Guessing he just used the AO instead as it would be very white and would suit Enscape's shader. Better off downloading the metalness workflow option download though.

This has also meant instead of the roughness option, he's using the gloss map (which is why the finish is so matte rather than the preview's finish). Again, this could be inverted, but better off using the proper roughness map in the metalness workflow. This shows how Enscape is so adaptable - doesn't matter what you have, just as long as you know how it can be arranged to get a good result.

Skatter is indispensable, I signed up to the earliest possible preview years ago and still use it all the time. It won't be as fast as Twinmotion, or even Forest pack, but it does exactly what it says it does, is quite flexible and is very reliable.

I should add, I am running a dual xeon/RTX3090/256gb RAM 2 x TB SSD machine (though I suspect the advantage of such a machine is limited with SketchUp), so can't say what the results will be on something more consumer-grade.

Have had the same issue - assumed it was a shortcoming of the software. Would be a cool fix to get!

Quote from ASxJ2099

Wait and monitor this thread.... a policy for many companies is, or should be, to wait on deployment of new software version for production until a few minor revisions are release... for some companies, a wait period of one year is required after a major X.0 release... your mileage and situation may vary...

So true. I'm part of the viz team, so we usually get going with it immediately, however I know I will have staff hankering to have a go when they see the marketing vids. Suspect we will hold off to first patch at least.