Posts by mannyl

  • Enscape and Chaos - Merge Announcement!

    Clearly the current Chaos/Enscape information void lends itself to a great deal of speculative talk fueled by the healthy diversity of many points of view.


    I think the liveliness of the conversations, as entertaining as it is, falls short of addressing the basic concern we all have in common - price strategy after the merger.


    I often wonder whether I will be able to afford Enscape + Chaos in a few years or exclusively rely on my company to provide the necessary software, like is currently the case with Autodesk applications. And I am lucky, my company gladly acquires the resources I need to do my job.


    It is a huge disappointment that after spending thousands of my own dollars on "permanent licenses" one finds the rug pulled under our feet by the pay-as-you-go subscription schemes so ubiquitous these days.


    I get it! It makes sense from a business standpoint (if you are on the corporate side of the equation), for others, especially the small entrepreneurs in the business of visualization, it creates a perpetual need to compete on price until one gets priced out of the market, or worse, people resorting to software piracy.


    The impact of escalating prices is devastating on the small entrepreneurs everywhere and threatens to wipe out many of us who used to earn a side income providing cool looking visualizations after hours.


    That said, I would give Enscape and Chaos the benefit of the doubt and simply wait until better information is made available to the public directly from them.


    In the meantime I keep my Rhino 3D license current and I am sharpening my Blender skills just in case.:)

  • Enscape + Chaos licensing options

    Hello!


    Perhaps this question may have been addressed somewhere else, but just in case I would like to pose it to the business development team.


    Is there a licensing scenario where Enscape and Chaos would offer a combined master license, perhaps similar to VRay Collection? Perhaps with multi-yearly discounts?


    Thank you.

  • Mac Support Main Overview Thread

    Quote from tomankubik

    Well I have seen in too. And share the same excitement with you. Bit surprised that Apple didn’t reales basic studio with M1 pro for better price but…seems like I get rid off my windows Rtx workstation and buy studio with M1 max…ultra version is above my budged…I expect that Twinmotion is almost ready for it…but what about Enscape…it’s total silence about it…😉

    I am anxious to see a first impression report from the Enscape development team. :)


    If the M1 Ultra comes through as advertised you will make your money back in a jiffy!

  • Enscape and Chaos - Merge Announcement!

    Quote from jtubb

    Agreed - Autodesk is a poor example to compare to Chaos Group. Again I believe this will result in a very similar situation when Epic Games acquire TwinMotion.
    I'm under the impression you either, haven't used VRay or had some kind of bad experience?

    I am afraid you are missing the point, but OK. Not important. I would not speculate further and I am optimistic about the merger news in any case.;) By the way, Twinmotion is shaping up to be quite a contender.

  • Enscape and Chaos - Merge Announcement!

    This is very exciting news!

    I have been a fan and advanced user of VRay for about 7 years now, but once I started using Enscape around 5 years ago I have been using it almost exclusively, unless I am occasionally required to use Lumion.

    Enscape is a great product at a reasonable price point, and I appreciate how diligent you are at improving the software with every update.

    Now a bit of background…

    Many decades ago I used a rendering package called Lightscape. Perhaps some older users may remember it. At that time that software was fantastic, even though I always had to render overnight and I could not use my computer for anything else. So much for multitasking in those early Windows NT days.

    Years later Autodesk acquired Discrete, the company that created Lightscape, folded it into its product line and soon it was gone. Nowhere to be seen again.

    I truly hope this Chaos/Enscape merger is mutually beneficial to both parties and many of us keep using Enscape for many years to come, because as much as I like VRay I have become a big fan of the elegant simplicity of Enscape’s interface and the excellent quality of the renderings it is capable of generating.

    I look forward to learning more details in the near future.

  • Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 SLI Enscape support

    Hello,


    Is a dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 with SLI bridge a supported GPU configuration? If not, are there any current plans to support dual Nvidia GPU with SLI?


    I wonder whether a dual GPU configuration would effectively provide any meaningful advantage over a single card as related to Enscape performance.


    Thank you!

  • Z-Fighting Fix

    I have never experienced those kinds of issues and typically I use and exchange geometry among various modeling programs.


    In my personal experience building complex renderings with solids, meshes or other geometric elements from Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, AutoCAD, Maya, 3DMax and several others is never a problem as long as I follow commonly accepted industry practices, that is clean geometry, free as much as possible from strenuous hidden surfaces and or artifacts, etc. Just basic common knowledge prep work.


    Maybe the Enscape programmers could shed some light on the potential capability of a rendering engine to sort out geometric inaccuracies while processing a file. Perhaps IA may some day allow for that small miracle to happen.;)

  • Graphic Card recommendations

    Hi -


    I have been looking into this issue myself since I have an 8 year old workstation with an Nvidia GTX 1080, which by the way performs great with Enscape.


    The main issue I have found is the power supply requirement for the new Nvidia RTX series. I have a 280 Watt power supply in my trusty old Dell T5400 and I would need a dual-slot rated at 320 W to run the new 30x monster cards. Upgrading is not an option. Is best to buy a newer more powerful system with no bottlenecks.


    That said, the RTX 2080ti is a hell of a card by many metrics and far less expensive than the newer generation. I would get that one for my T5400 even if I could only get 80% out of it due to the limitations of my current chipset.

  • Oculus Quest 2 and enscape

    Hi -


    I have gone back and forth with Oculus Customer Service regarding this issue and they confirmed the Anker cable is compatible although they never gave me the specific product name. Apparently there is only one in the market and it has to be USB-C.


    In addition, the Link feature is in Beta testing still, so in time, cross my finger, quality will be much improved after Oculus gets through this process. I have an original Oculus Link and a first generation Quest and I encounter distortion issues every now and then.


    Aside from that I also discovered that the specifications of my workstation did not match the minimum specs for Oculus Quest although it is a bit better for the Rift-S. In fact Oculus does not yet provide certification for the high-end Nvidia Quadro cards and Intel XEON cpu's.


    As far as the Oculus family of VR headsets is concerned you are better off with a VR-ready gaming PC than a pro-level workstation, at least for the time being.

  • Z-Fighting Fix

    I have experienced a similar situation but I have to tell you, there is no better remedy than starting a job with a precise delineation of geometric elements to avoid interference. Also very important, to separate presentation modeling from construction documentation since those have two very different purposes.


    We do a fair amount of work in multifamily and hospitality development and so there are a lot of repetitive elements like balcony slabs and exposed ceiling finishes, and it is not unusual to accidentally have a floor slab and a balcony slab occupying the same space in 3D. It pays to know where to stop one and start the other to prevent double dipping, or organize your reference geometry so you may unload the guts of the building model to avoid surfaces in close proximity for the purpose of rendering.


    I typically have at my disposal at least 3 professional level rendering packages including Enscape and they all behave the same when the base model contains interferences.

  • Self-Illumination Dialog Box options for use of multiple industry standard units - (cd/m2) - (Lumen/ft) - (Lumen/ft2) - (Watts/ft) - etc.

    Hi Development Team,


    In the past I have used other rendering applications (Lightscape, VRay and Maxwell) to address illumination exercises that come up from time to time during the course of business. Often times nice looking daylight renderings is all is needed to sell an architectural idea, but I have found, perhaps because of the nature of my business, that twilight or evening renderings are far more impactful when rendering architectural spaces designed for entertainment, hospitality and retail. When the Sun goes down people come out and the quality and perception of an urban space changes dramatically in the evening when artificial lighting takes over.


    One aspect of rendering illuminated spaces that remains an industry challenge is identifying and/or sourcing the right lighting product from a rendered image. Imagine a scenario where a client is sold on the one idea based upon the look of an evening rendition of their future space, and then proceeding to select light fixtures from the vast options in the marketplace, hoping that the finished space would look as close as possible to the successful rendering. Often time, targets are missed and the final product may look very different than the imagined one.


    I recently went through an exercise where the best option on LED strip lighting is so new the manufacturer does not have an IES file available but provided photometric data. Is not uncommon to find one manufacturer using lumen/ft while another uses watts/ foot or nits or foot candles. The units used to measure illumination may be all over the place and conversion is not always straightforward.


    I would like to suggest the possibility of selecting multiple standard units for illumination in addition to cd/m2. Perhaps a drop-down dialog box populated with industry standard units and therefore the ability to switch from Luminance to Illuminance to Lux or even power consumption as some manufacturers prefer to identify their products.


    I think the ability to do this in addition to the use of IES files would add enormous functionality to a future version of Enscape, and perhaps even the use of an extended Assent Library that may include actual functioning lighting fixtures and sources which may be provided by the lighting industry as ready made objects to be selected from online catalogs ready to use.


    By the way, congrats on the new 2.7, it is fantastic!:)

  • Enscape Materials stopped working - 2020-02-15

    I believe I have found the cause of the issue. One of the textures may have a formatting error or something embedded that caused the Enscape Materials dialog to malfunction.

    When I replaced the suspecting texture the issue went away.

    The visual queue was that the culprit texture kept disappearing from the Enscape viewport, then reappearing by itself.