Posts by rifkin

    Troubleshooting this for a user. Live on-screen and still exports look as expected, but when an animation is generated, the results are vastly different, with odd shadows/lighting.


    If I preview the animation in the Enscape window, all looks as expected, and it plays basically real-time. Live navigating around the model looks fine. It is only when saving out the animation that there is an issue. To me it looks like Escape is just "giving up" and not including all the geometry in the shadow calc in order to get the frames generated faster.


    It is a pretty large Revit 2021 file with lots of linked-in furniture and equipment. Images are simplified for testing purposes. You can see the horizon/extents of the Section box in the images (for testing purposes.) My initial thought was light getting in as a result of the crop, but the extent of the crop box doesn't really make a difference.


    - RAM and VRAM are nowhere near maxing out (monitored with Task Manager and GPU-Z)

    - Reset all prefs to Enscape defaults. Auto-contrast is turned off.

    - No time of day overrides in the animation path

    - Exported at "high" and "ultra" quality with similar results. (turning down to "medium" mostly corrects the issue, but that is not a desirable workaround.)

    - Tried and duplicated on entirely different PCs/GPUs - combination of Intel/AMD CPU - RTX A4000 (RTX) / Titan Xp (no RTX)

    - We are using Enscape 3.4.x but tested with 3.5, same results

    - Updated and backdated nvidia drivers, same results

    - Tried with and without RTX features enabled, same results.

    - Internal Revit origin is within the building, not 20+ miles away.


    I understand there is a limited amount of support that can be done without gathering the file and all the links, At this point I'm mostly looking for other people's experiences and comments from the Enscape team, if this is generally expected behavior, or if there is something else I may be missing. Thank you.


    The hardware specs we are currently testing: Windows 10 (64bit), 64GB RAM, CPU: i9-12950HX, GPU: Nvidia RTX A4500...

    I've observed 3 "phases" in Task Manager when starting Enscape :

    1 - single threaded calculations (so overall CPU utilization is low, but basically one core is maxed.)

    2- brief burst of multi-core calcs (overall CPU usage to 100%)

    3 - GPU Load to 100% when the model finally loads (task Manager doesn't seem to show this, I use GPU-Z)


    Have you actually benchmarked/timed the laptop against the desktops? And if so, what are the desktop specs? I'd suspect the issue to be more about user perception and/or model management. "This file worked fine last week on my desktop, now it is super slow on my laptop." (Not mentioning they added 1000 trees between last week and today.)


    You can't get much better on the laptop specs. You could move from the "Pro" Nvidia GPU to the gaming line (the laptop 4090 is pretty impressive.) But that won't help with the CPU-bound load times.


    Take these benchmarks with a grain of salt but they generally correspond to what I've seen with Enscape performance on various GPUs.

    PassMark Software - Video Card (GPU) Benchmarks - High End Video Cards (videocardbenchmark.net)

    Scale the whole model up - 2x, 4x, 10x ?

    This will in effect make the grass "smaller" and give it a larger distance to work within the gaps.


    Not ideal but it's a workaround if you just need to spit out a few images.

    Does the server appear as a drive letter when you are in the office? If so, get yourself an external ssd, and set the drive letter in Windows to be the same as the server. Use the same folder structure on that drive and Enscape will find the assets.


    X:\WORK\PROJECT\ASSETS\whatever


    If it is something more sophisticated, you could potentially get a network drive at home that attaches to your router, name it the same as the server at work and try to get it set up to use the same path. I've got minimal experience with networking, but it seems like that should be do-able. At any rate I'd focus on trying to replicate the path on your home PC before you have everyone change their workflow.

    It boils down to one question: Why the noise?

    It probably comes down to the size/detail of the scene or geometry in combination with the amount of VRAM and render quality. If you copy/paste a portion of the scene into a new file, do you get the same noise? What about a really simple scene? (like just a box.)

    95% of the time this is Enscape's way of saying "your scene is too big."


    - turn off any "RTX" features as those have been buggy in the past.

    - turn off and/or delete unneeded geometry in your scene.

    - reduce output quality and/or resolution.

    - Get a GPU with more VRAM

    Materials export just fine. So if I model a cube and add an Enscape material to it, it will export fine and work on Sketchup.

    Not really. Enscape just creates a basic Rhino material, and that is what Sketchup reads. Any Enscape-specific material tweaks do not carry over. (ie, if you change the material type from Generic to Grass in Rhino, you won't see it as Grass in Sketchup.)


    It's the nature of Enscape working as a plug-in vs a standalone; they are more beholden to the host program as compared to some other solutions. Not saying it isn't solvable but it would require some sort of Enscape-specific import/export tool.


    What is the Quixel workflow like? I've not looked at it in some time, is there a plug-in for assets, or are you just downloading and importing an .fbx file?

    Just the way it has always been. The new host program is only going to see the geometry placeholders. Somewhere on the forum there was talk of a Revit script to interpret and re-assign proper assets when moving from Rhino to Revit. Not seen anything for Sketchup.

    What driver version are you on? There were issues recently with a specific Nvidia driver release. If you have updated recently, maybe try an older version.

    WARNING: Enscape crashes with the latest NVIDIA drivers - Error | Bug Reports & License Problems - Enscape Community Forum (enscape3d.com)


    Does this happen with -every- Revit file? or just a particular one? That error can be a number of things, but often just means there is too much going on in the scene and you are running out of VRAM.


    - turn off any "RTX" features as those have been buggy in the past.

    - use a section box to limit the extents of the scene.

    - turn off unneeded geometry (plumbing/mechanical/furniture.)

    - reduce output quality and/or resolution.

    Thanks much for the thorough response. Very helpful, but can you comment any more on the difference between "processed" and "exported?" Would it be fair to broadly associate "meshing" with exporting and "lighting" with processing?


    All Hosts - Invisible geometry is not processed

    vs

    SketchUp/Rhino Enscape 3.4.3 - All geometry is exported.

    We render the triangulated geometry 1:1 as we get it from Revit.

    Is there a way in Revit to preview the triangulations?

    How (or does) this differ from Rhino and/or Sketchup?


    The tessellation in Rhino generally looks smoother. Is Enscape or Rhino driving that? If you were to pre-mesh everything in Rhino, would the "Exporting" process go faster?

    So this is certainly an issue, I would very much like to create close up images however this is not possible with this engine :(

    Enscape is designed primarily for real-time rendering so yes it has to make trade-offs. That said there may be things you can do to influence how it triangulates. See my questions from prior post - Can you clarify -


    - The rendered image is from Enscape?

    - Can you post Revit wireframe and shaded views showing both faucets?

    Is your issue with uploading, or just creating the panorama? It looks like Enscape can't find or access your user folder where the panoramas get saved.