Posts by Mercury

I think this would be a good opportunity for Enscape to offer something that nobody is offering at the moment. All designs start with a conceptual idea and its at that point in time where many of the materials are still unknown, but yet the most design visualization occurs. A photorealistic rendering is great, but that's really the finish line. I need Enscape to help me convey an idea from start to finish and supplement the entire design process, not just the final output. Most of the time a photorealistic rendering is not even necessary.

Give me a mode where I can visually ideate quickly without the need for materials. I build the model in Revit, then view the model in Enscape, find a good view, and start painting, coloring, etc... on top of the 3D view, and it ends up looking like a nice hand drawing with color that I can show a client.

Enscape is currently what many architects use to create "final" renderings, but it would be great if there were visual settings that are better suited for preliminary rendering in the early stages of a project. Anything from sketchy styles to water color visualization would be great. Think along the lines of renderings from the early 20th century or hand colored landscape architects plans.

The visual settings would consist of a variety of options such as:

- Control the color and thickness of surface edges.

- Control the jitter or extension of lines for sketchy styles.

- Control background color.

- 2D silhouette people with a transparency adjustment.

- Etc...

The goal is to make preliminary design visualization quicker and with a result that doesn't look so polished. Clients prefer less polished renderings because they feel there is still opportunity to provide input and make changes. They feel more a part of the design process as well.

Over the years I've had clients ask me for an Enscape model that is set to white mode, but shows 1 or 2 items within the view fully rendered. For example, in conceptual design, we might be concerned with the exterior signage of the building. So we want to see everything white except the signs. The contrast would really make the objects pop and help focus the discussion of a meeting. In addition, you would only need to worry about mapping materials to a few Revit families rather than having to resolve material mapping issues for an entire model.