Posts by Thomas Willberger

The reason for your dark-looking materials is that your skybox is too dark or the sun intensity too bright. This causes too heavy contrasts from light/shadow. You can fix both in the visual settings.

Micha, right RTX will help to improve metals and glass in the long run. We see it as a future proof path, thats why we did it rather immediately.

We also strive for a complete core product. Please understand that the requirements for what that actually is differ from user to user (although many here in the forums think similiarly). The Vectorworks or ArchiCad support is unrelated to rendering features as we can easily parallelize this development, whereas its harder to implement related stuff simultanously.

The agenda only contains the parts that we are able to promise and have top priority for this release. Other things are scheduled too, but it's sometimes hard to predict the length of engineering projects. The list also contains only the high level points, many small improvements are not listed but are on our agenda.

Enscape expects you to place light sources not as "fill lights", but rather where they are in reality: In this case, at the ceiling or walls. In reality, there are no lights that magically do not appear in the specular component of a surface.

Since this concept is non trivial, we think that disabling specular per light (not even per material) would create unbelievable fake-looking images with dull surfaces.

Here are a few tutorials for the Enscape asset library:

We continuously increase the number and variety of assets independent from Enscape releases (it's web based) to make your visualization life easier!

The next version will include the Enscape material editor for ArchiCAD. It is one of our main goals to establish feature parity.

You can press "P" to start the preview from an arbitrary position.

It's not yet done, will quite likely be in the final 2.6 release.

The workaround for huge area lights is to use emissive objects. This is also very similar to what you have seen in GDC videos Micha.

We identified some of the human texture as too dark. We will fix that for the next asset update. I can't tell you yet when this is going to be released. The asset updates (as happened a few days ago) are independent from regular Enscape releases and if you have internet connection, they are automatically updated. There is currently no way ("ini" file option) to fix that on your own.

Thank you, we will check that.

Quote from annevanzwol

Just thinking aloud. You know the geometry. Why not just use that to cast a normal shadow and then give the shadow some transparancy based on the transparancy percentage?

I understand that this would be a rough estimation. However it would look more realistic. Now it looks like the objects are floating above the surface

This would be a good way from a common-sense perspective, but given the way real time graphics and shadow mapping work, this is not feasible without significant performance cost. We may add it however for screenshot and video exports.

Quote from SkipFifth

Hello, different but possibly related issue?
The taillights on some models seem to somehow cut through or negate the scene lighting. It is very noticeable and makes them a focus of any given view.

This will be fixed in the upcoming release / preview. It is only relates to fog in combination with transparent objects.

Currently, "workarounding" ortho by using a small FOV is not reliable and the disadvantages of this method can not be fixed by you. We will add a correct ortho rendering mode in the future which will solve this issue.

If you're talking about their "Realskies", this is 100% identical to going to https://hdrihaven.com/ and picking a skybox. They just ship it with the product, but it's still not animated. It is technically not impossible to play-back 360° HDRI videos of a sky, but it's challenging.

Reality-captured HDRIs have of course the best quality since they are as close to real as it gets. You can get many of them for free at sources like those: https://hdrihaven.com/

Animated, reality captured HDRI skies are a challenging topic. It's a bit unlikely that this will happen soon. There are also more realistic approaches to cloud rendering (like the one from Vue) but they are very far away from real time, when we talk about animations etc.

Quote from Pieter

Nice. Can you guys push new assets to our library without us having to install a new Enscape version?

Exactly.

Quote from andybot

Just because other software packages also have issues like that doesn't mean we will give up asking.

I hope so! We appreciate your feedback and it motivates us to reach to quality and feature goals! We will continue to push hard to incorporate your wishes.

Thank you all for your feedback. The challenging part of "listening" is the objectification of how many users would be affected by improving a certain feature or adding a new one. We increase our manpower very fast to satisfy the increasing divergence of requirements, while trying to stay focused on the goal of "design reviews and client presentation for architecture".

andybot : This applies to all kind of software products that allow users to use them in a flexible and individual way, which leads to unpredictability. We test Enscape on many different projects before bundling release, but it may still be possible that a user uses Enscape in a way that we have not encountered so far. Of course technical limitations etc also play a role.

This observation is correct. With every Enscape version, we improve the light transport and shading model slightly to approach the quality of common offline renderers. Sometimes, the change is caused by bugfixes, sometimes it's due to more accurate calculations.

I understand that this is is not pleasant during version changes, yet we think it is necessary to continue improving. A "fallback" mode of Enscape to support older versions look&feel is not possible, in this case you inevitably need to install an older version.