I don't know that just scaling it down is the solution - the problem is all the white space that is so prevalent in current interface design in general. The whole thing could be compacted without making the text any smaller.
Also, some windows being resizable, others not, is frustrating.
I mean I get that a 13900K would be faster than a 12700K but is it only a few seconds faster and worth the upgrade?
I've lately been more into looking at Threadripper and multi-GPU setups for Vray performance. With Enscape, I try to keep projects fairly light, but others in our firm have no hesitation about throwing in geometry/assets until something breaks. Then I try to help fix it. Point being, I haven't been overly concerned with optimizing launch times, but it's something I hope to look into more. Especially in light of what I found w/ one particularly large Rhino model as outlined in this thread.
Based on general single core benchmarks, I would expect Escape to respond similarly with a roughly 15% increase between a 12700 and 13900, but I have no personal experience. If I were opening large projects every day I'd probably think it was worth it.
Third, has anyone explored doing this themselves, perhaps using a more manual (cheaper?) workflow with prosumer reality capture tools?
There are a number of 3D scan apps that work with the iPhone or iPad Pro Lidar. I've not scanned people, but have created other Enscape assets for specific purposes. Quality/resolution is not good, but something you could mess around with for free (or minimal fee.) They typically export to fbx or obj and you can clean up in Rhino or whatever if needed.
If you go with an outside service, I expect fbx and obj would be typical format offerings. Maybe you can specify polygon targets for them, I'd suggest a 20k version and a 100k version, so you have a lower-res model that fits the Enscape suggested asset size, and a higher-res model if you need it. Otherwise take whatever hi-res version they offer and try to do poly reduction in 3DSMax or something.
...How much faster will it be to open projects and especially projects with a lot of high polygon Custom Assets.
Launching Enscape seems to be a largely CPU-bound exercise as it is processing geometry. Try opening some of your files and watch your Task Manager/CPU performance, and maybe GPU-Z to monitor the GPU. (Task Manager also shows GPU bit it doesn't always seem accurate.) For most of the launch process, the GPU is doing nothing, it is all on the CPU, and only one core at that. So from that aspect a GPU upgrade probably isn't going to help a lot.
When you say high-poly assets, given that Enscape recommended is 20k, are you talking about a bit over 20k, over 100k, or more...? Obviously many assets out there from Turbosquid etc are insanely detailed, so spending some time doing poly reduction in 3DSMax or other software could be well worth it.
We are using the Oculus Quest and the Oculus Quest 2. Both preform great with the older version of Enscape, but with the newer versions not so much. Steam and Steam VR are not something a lot of companies allow to be installed.... but sending the VR files to clients and having to explain to them Install steam, wait also install SteamVR is just way too much to explain and expect of a client to do....
Twinmotion, Lumion are two others we use and Steam and SteamVR are not needed and jump right into VR mode. Twinmotion's EXE file is almost as easy as Enscapes use to be. They don't package everything into one compact file. So explaining to clients to unzip into a folder is sometimes a bit confusing for some.
I've not tried Twinmotion/Lumion VR lately, but if you are using them with Oculus, then you have the Oculus software installed, correct? So there is still another layer of software and account management involved, it's just not Steam. Within the Oculus ecosystem, Enscape works with Oculus Rift S, with no Steam required. But it still requires the Oculus software. The issue with the Quest + Enscape is that you need both Steam and Oculus, but I'm not sure how/why there would be a difference between Enscape 3.1 and 3.4 in that regard.
We pretty much ditched the Oculus when they started requiring a Facebook login. Now that is a problem in a business environment. Or telling a client they have to log into Facebook to use VR? Fortunately, Oculus has backtracked to just needing a Meta account but the whole Facebook connection still leaves a bad taste. Any client that has a VR headset will be familiar with Steam and/or Oculus, there should be no explaining needed.
Our client wants to buy a rig - soup-to-nuts, computer and everything. But agreed, we can't be managing all of this STEAM business.
What is the most sure-fire set up right now?
The most hassle-free solution and easiest setup would be a lightly used Rift S on eBay. The Quest/Quest Pro is a pain to deal with the Link cable setup and reliability imho. I also found colors to be oddly washed out/low contrast on the Pro with Enscape. Which is a shame because it looks stellar otherwise.
The next most hassle-free would be the Valve Index. Yes it will need Steam, but that's all. There has to be -something- running the drivers behind the scenes. Other options (Vive, Windows Mixed Reality) require their own software running in addition to Steam, like the Quest situation w/Enscape.
And yes, getting Steam installed in a corporate environment can be a hassle since it falls under the "gaming" umbrella. It is frustrating that no one lets you just install a driver package without their whole interface/overlay, but that's the state of things currently.
We have a large auditorium project in Rhino. There is a ton of detailed geometry (seating, stage lighting, etc.) as well as design iterations on various layers. This has been handed off between a number of users and is far from an efficient model. The time for Enscape to load w/textures + lighting is around 20 minutes.
I had always assumed that Enscape only processes the visible geometry, but found that by -deleting- the hidden elements (cutting the size of the model roughly in half) the Enscape load time gets cut in half as well. (In retrospect this makes sense, as Enscape always seems quick to update when turning layers on/off.) This got me thinking - can the Enscape team clarify how hidden geometry is taken into account with the various host programs? We of course tell our users to turn off unneeded elements to speed up performance, but if Enscape processes the entire model anyway, then that really doesn't make much difference.
Rhino - It appears that hidden layers are processed.
- Are linked Blocks (not embedded) on hidden layers processed?
- Does mesh geometry process faster than smooth/parametric geometry? ie, would pre-meshing everything speed up the Enscape calculations?
Sketchup -
- Are hidden tags/layers processed? Are "hidden" objects processed?
Revit -
- I'm pretty sure a Section Box is effective at preventing geometry outside the box from being calculated, but perhaps Enscape team can confirm?
- Are hidden model categories calculated? We tell our users to turn off plumbing, pipes, etc for rendering purposes, but based on what I found with Rhino now I am wondering if that even matters?
I plan to do more testing w/large models and various scenarios but wanted to see if I can get any more info here.
Still no reassurance from Enscape yet, couple that with the fact that all the big Archviz youtubers stopped doing enscape videos months ago...
Much like Sketchup, I think Enscape is a bit of a victim of its own success by virtue of its ease of use. As others have said, it is a design tool. It has allowed our typical Revit/Rhino/Sketchup users to easily generate their own renderings that fulfill 90% of their needs for communicating design intent. It isn't a ProViz tool, but people have managed to push it to nearly the level.
I certainly have a list of items w/Enscape that have gone unaddressed for years, but render quality is not generally a concern, If I need the highest quality I will use a different tool. If your competitors are using superior software that costs less, why are you sticking around?
Which Oculus headset?
...but I can't come anywhere near being able to real-time render with high settings and process smoothly. The 3070 laptop version for instance has 8G vram which I wonder if it's the main culprit. Again, not only am I needing eketchup and enscape but also VR on top of it so it's just quite taxing.
If you want the "best" for now I'd recommend this Lenovo Legion. It is pretty impressive as far as laptops go, but I doubt it would be leaps and bounds above what you have now. At a certain point you just have to manage your scenes and expectations. Enscape does a reasonable job of adapting scenes to fit within the available VRAM (to a point) so I wouldn't assume that 3080/16GB VRAM is going to make things go from "really poor" to buttery smooth.
For CPU, I don't know that it makes much difference, Intel and AMD are leapfrogging each other with each release. For GPU I'd stick with Nvidia. Given the hardware you have now, to see a significant difference I'd wait a couple months for laptops w/ 13th gen intel + 4090 laptop GPU.
Do you have a budget in mind? How big are your projects? Are you shopping in the US or elsewhere?
imho this is hands down the best option currently:
Lenovo 16" Legion 7i Gaming Notebook (Storm Grey) 82TD0005US B&H (bhphotovideo.com)
nvidia just announced 40-series laptop GPUs this week, but it will probably take months for those to come to market.
The RTX "A" series is basically the Quadro replacement. Not sure why they dropped the branding, it just makes things more confusing. The A5000 is an older architecture than the 4090. This PassMark chart puts it in the neighborhood of a 3070. Generally the Geforce/gaming cards are going to perform better and cost less than a comparable "Quadro" for things like Enscape.
Thanks for help. I just bought a monitor that has sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamut. I hope It will be fine.
I expect the main concern would be images looking the same in Enscape as they do in Photoshop. The problem is most 3D apps are not color-aware, while Photoshop is. It used to be a safe bet that if you were working on a decent IPS screen with 99% sRGB, images would display correctly pretty much anywhere. PC content is traditionally intended to be consumed in sRGB - when fed into a screen with wider gamut through a non color-aware app, you get oversaturated colors. Some may find that visually appealing, which is fine, it just isn't an accurate representation of the content.
For your own usage, I expect you'll have the easiest time if you can get things set up to work within the hardware settings on the monitor; hopefully set it to sRGB and be done with it. if you are concerned about how your work is being viewed elsewhere, you unfortunately have little control of how others are seeing it. With HDR and all the gamut specs being pushed to consumers now, things are all over the map. Windows is inconsistent in how it uses color profiles; browsers may or may not respect sRGB content.
I don't profess to be an expert; I've banged my head on this off and on for years. My main concern is getting the most consistent results across users and devices in our firm with the least hassle. If you are just concerned about your own setup, you have much more flexibility. A couple useful links:
Taming the Wide Gamut using sRGB Emulation | PCMonitors.info
Since the Asset Library shows in the taskbar, that suggests the window should be open somewhere. Is there a chance you had the Asset window dragged to a second monitor that is no longer connected? If you hit alt-tab to cycle through open windows, can you see a preview of the Asset window?
Something that does 99-100% sRGB would be most appropriate. Although finding something that "just" does sRGB these days is a challenge. Some displays will let you switch between color profiles.
...work on a local copy of the model or revert back to Enscape 2.9.
...Perhaps also worth noting: the latest releases seem to be less stable for us than the older 2.x series. We are definitely experiencing more crashes.
...We are currently holding on to earlier version 2.9 until we find fixes or workarounds, but we are looking to deploy 3.4 by end of the year.
Is the implication here that one would also hold at Revit 2021? Rolling back to a 2-yr old Revit version is not really an option. Or is it possible to use v2.9 with Revit 2022/23?
Agreed, if the slider went up to 1000% it would be helpful.
Another workaround, depending on the host app, would be to scale the entire scene down. Or in Rhino you can change the scene units but tell it not to scale the geometry. Obviously not a great long-term solution, and probably not an option w/Revit.
Extrapolating from that, since the grass is already picking up the color of the texture map, would it be too much to ask to be able to add greyscale maps for density/placement/height control?
Somewhat off topic, but have you tried the Pro w/Enscape in linked mode? I've only tested briefly but found the image to be washed out (overly bright/low contrast.) Which was disappointing since the image quality looks spectacular outside of Enscape.
An out-of-the-box portable VR experience would be great if that is actually on the roadmap. There are also increased rumblings about Apple's AR headset; given Enscape's Mac development, hopefully there is some potential there.
I'd be willing to bet some big firm that primarily uses MAC told them they'd buy X amount of licenses and that's whats caused this huge shift in focus to MAC recently.
In an Autodesk-dominated AEC world, I can't imagine any large firm being primarily Mac-based. It always seemed to me that the Mac requests were coming from independent users or smaller firms. I wonder if Enscape has become successful enough to reach a saturation point in the AEC industry. With companies being driven for continued growth, Mac users represent a new market (though I would be surprised if the number of Mac users justifies the development resources.)
Enscape has a pretty unique niche. There is a lot of vocal discontent here and threats to leave for other solutions, but there is nothing else that integrates with the host software like Enscape, and just "works" for the end user without additional hoops to jump through. Without a realistic alternative there isn't a lot of incentive to focus on stability and feature fixes vs finding new customers.
Is the blurryness related to motion, or there all the time? (ie, does it clear up when you fix your gaze on one spot?) I've not used a Cosmos in some time but didn't note any particular issues with it in terms of visual quality. The thing I've noticed in Steam settings is that "motion smoothing" makes things "swimmy" on any headset, so that needs to be turned off. Honestly if the client was happy with the Oculus, you might just be better off finding a gently used one on eBay or something.
The thing I want to do is upload the 360Mono panorame to MY server, or MY website so all my panoramas are not kept on Enscapes servers.
Yes, then you either need to buy 3DVista or similar, or find/figure out code to do it as Paul linked in the first reply. There isn't anything else that can be done on Enscape's end.
