Posts by skhayward

This is a neat gimmick but has nothing to do with what enscape is used for and isn't even a good output to tweak renders with... It's purely a tool to do iterative/brainstorm design, and even then I'd argue it's more like a toy.

The only purpose AI could have in the near term in making actual renders would maybe be taking over the "polish in photoshop" stage, which these days I almost never have to do anyways. Would hate for the team to waste time doing a gimmick feature like this.

Call me in 2-3 years when this stuff is good enough to have some true precision. Prompting is such a huge waste of time, the latest buzzword fueld by marketing departments and grifter techbros. This kind of tech needs real tools, real power and real precision so stuff can be accurately dialed in by the hands of an actual designer/artist, especially for our industry. Only then will AI's true productivity for real world work be seen. To me, this stuff stop being a time wasting toy when I can do something like being able to give it a picture of a stone slab I'm specing for a client and have it automatically generate a PBR texture to apply to a countertop that looks photo accurate in the output. And on top of that, have it still work in real time.

For switching of materials/lighting between things like furniture and objects, design options is definitely the way to go. Then make sure the 3D view you are using in enscape is set to "automatic" mode for design options. Then all you do is switch to which option is active and the scene should live update.

Keep in mind live updating isn't fool proof for me, sometimes I need to restart enscape to get it to reload the scene fully. Its an annoying bug, and I don't think I've ever ran into it when switching design options, but if it seems like something isn't working the solution might be to just restart enscape.

So in revit using hide is always view specific. So if you are hiding by element or temp hiding, it only applies to the current view you are on.

If you want to hide something globally (i.e. equivalent to turning a layer off) you need to have those items on a workset or you need to set up some kind of view filter that is applied to a view template that your 3D views use. Such as, I have an "accessories" selection group that only has small Enscape asset accessories added to it, then all my 3D views use a view template that filters everything in that group to be visible or invisible depending on my needs for a render.

Alternatively if you want to just switch between "scenes" just duplicate the 3D view and then hide different items on that view vs the the original. If you want to switch between materials or layouts instead of just toggling visibility of certain items, you'll have to use design options to do this and each view assigned to a different design option in the visibility graphics dialog. If you're not familiar with how design options work I recommend going through a tutorial as its a bit too much to cover in a forum post.

Agreed. I'd love to be able to do batch rendering but because it creates totally unique file names every time its a big pain to update existing renders to be the new ones without having to do a lot of manual renaming, or by just manually doing the renders one by one.

Draft mode looks the same as the second picture above as far as lighting is concerned with site context on or off. The lighting is equally flattened in both cases.

On medium, where the lighting is more detailed, turning off site context has it looking closer to the first image and when enabled dramatically reduces the quality of lighting to look like draft mode, which looks similar to the second image. The same follows through on high and ultra settings.

Been having the strangest issue with my model lately in that during the daytime, it appears as if all artificial lights just stop working and the shadow/lighting depth of the image is flattened. This was strange as a few weeks ago when I last worked on the model I wasn't having this issue at all. The only thing I had changed since then was I added site context. I then discovered that if I have site context showing at all, all lighting in the model gets bizarrely flattened (night time works fine however).

This issue happens even if my model is set to color mode - though the model at the moment doesn't have materials assigned.

It also happens to rooms without any windows or views to the outside which shouldn't be affected by anything going on outside. Its as if the entire model takes on the "polystyrol" setting with light bleeding through everywhere, flattening the whole image.

Needless to say, this feature can't be used at all with how it destroys lighting in the model. Which is a shame since for some of our projects like this one, showing "the view" is helpful information. I don't remember having this issue at all with site context in past versions.

I've found the lenovo legion i7's to run revit+enscape perfectly fine. Make sure you upgrade to at least 32gb RAM though. Mine was below $2000 but above $1500.

You can also look for AMD offerings by Eluktronics, a small laptop manufacturer in the US. I find they tend to be a cheaper, more general laptop manufacturer than some of the name brands like Razer, but still just as good (even if the styling isn't as premium). AMD tends to be cheaper overall - but I would still stick with an nvidia graphics card to take advantage of RTX.

A 3060 runs Enscape just fine (my laptop) but you'll want beefier if you're doing VR at all or presenting in 4K (doesn't sound like you are) though). However for my use case, which is just explorting still renders/panos, I've not needed more than the 3060 in power. It runs Ultra settings with RTX perfectly fine at the windowed resolution I run enscape at (somewhere just shy of 1080p).

Located in USA. Still experience this. I've sent the log files as requested.

Updating some panoramas and upload fails with an error "Panorama could not be uploaded".

Downloading and browsing assets works completely fine. All ports are open, so shouldn't be a firewall issue (this was working fine earlier and nothing changed in my setup).

Best tool for this job the sloped glazing tool with no glazing and have your mullions = the standing seams. Then place over your roof.

Go into your revit options then to the hardware tab. What does it list as the graphics processor for hardware acceleration?

The only time I've run into this problem has been if despite having a dedicated GPU, revit has loaded using the CPU graphics which enscape isn't compatible with (it'll say its using an intel graphics processor on that page). If you have a laptop, sometimes revit will load only using the CPU graphics instead of using your graphics card if you load revit while you're on battery or running an energy save mode. The solution is to close revit, plug in and/or run in "prefer maximum performance" mode for your PC, then restart revit. It should load with the correct video card now. Try also turning off any "hybrid mode" or "optimus" features on your laptop if you have any, as they can force programs to use the wrong video card for power saving reasons.

Have to say.... site context for our area is unusable. The roads all sink below the terrain and as such aren't visible at all. The terrain isn't too accurate. This isn't even getting into the fact that all buildings are just set to be generic 3 story shapes that are = to the footprint making a low density area look high density.

I'm fine with it not being perfect, but this isn't even 50% close to good. Where are all the nice looking buildings in the video example?

Also, reflections seem to have no improvement for my use case. One of my biggest issues with Enscape is the fact that when you're exporting a render mirrors will darken the reflection it is mirroring. We use mirrors a lot and have resorted to just using "glass" to get around this, but would much rather not. What's even worse is that the reflection looks flawless when moving around or before the scene has "settled". I'd much rather just use whatever enscape is doing when you're moving around the model (even if its lower fidelity) for our mirrors when exporting.

As a matter of fact mirrors are even WORSE than before this update since now if there is smoked glass visible in the mirror reflection, it just completely blacks that glass out on our project.

Quote from mladen90

Just use filter in your vg with typename contains “enacape”, and turn it off.

Alternatively, if there are Enscape assets you want to show up (i.e. furniture/planting that you've edited to have 2D symbolic elements in plan) you can use a selection filter instead. I just make sure to add things like incidentals and accessories to my "accessories" selection filter as I go, then set the 2D views to not display that selection filter.

I can still see me using the site context feature as someone who does a lot of projects in rural-urban interface areas, especially since a lot of our work often overlooks a view. In this case individual building accuracy from context isn't critical. If a project is in a more urban area it doesn't seem like too much of an stretch to just use the site context as a guide for me to trace model in place something that is a bit closer to correct in terms of levels/structure, assuming things like roads/terrain are correct for all the above.

In either case, I can see the feature saving time or adding value.

Quote from scottyvalentine

right now unfortunately no. But it's not too complicated. The scenario is two stone floor materials that are the same, but the cut pattern on both are different. In my real scenario I have about 10 of the same material and ideally I'd want to show the gap (the grout line) between the stone tiles. I haven't dug deep on the trial and error of this, but I thought there might be a proven way to show grout lines. Bump, displacement or normal maps I guess.

You should make your own textures to accomplish this. Often stone/tile manufacturers have great resource images of their products on their pages you can just throw into photoshop to make a tileable texture. Then you can throw that texture into a normal/bump map creator program (Crazy Bump is the one I know off the top of my head, but last I checked it was pretty expensive for a task I'd only occasionally need to do) to create your bump map.

Personally I use architextures.com to do 90% of my stone and tile patterns. It comes built in with a Revit hatch pattern maker, and you can get really in weeds with grout line thickness and styles. The only downside is that it isn't absolute freedom - it doesn't currently let you adjust the patterns themselves outside of tile sizing (i.e. setting how much offset there is in the pattern) and it can't do novel shapes outside of of what it gives you, but you can get can do the majority of popular tiling patterns from it. It even lets you upload your own images to use as the material to tile with if you wanted, and you can even have it try to generate a bump map from that, though it's not going to be as accurate as their in-house stuff.

For the other 10%, I make the texture & pattern manually in photoshop. You can still bring in your own textures into architextures to have it attempt to generate a bump map - it does a good enough job as long as the tile isn't too crazy.

There's also another great resource (that is totally free) called Mosa tile generator. It not only supports full texture/bump map exports of tile patterns but also the hatch patterns. This is a lot more restrictive than architextures since you're working with their specific tile sizes and patterns for Mosa's tiles, but I find they have a lot of standard sizes and you can usually wrangle up a pattern that looks correct with what you're doing. Plus they do have much more varied and interesting patterns you can play with if you're in a purely conceptual stage in your project and don't need to tie the design down to a specific tile size yet.

I find a sun setting of 25-35% and an artificial light setting at full (200%) gets lights easily visible during day time. Currently with how exposure is calculated the sun pretty much overpowers everything otherwise. That said it could be argued that most lights aren't actually visible in brightly sunlit rooms - but still, I find Enscape's "camera" over-exposes the sun like a traditional camera would vs what the human eye does.

Also, you shouldn't rely on lighting using only emissive materials. Light using actual revit light objects, which support shadow casting. Emissive materials are nice as an accent light (wall glow from a sconce, stair lighting, etc) but the lighting they use is pretty basic, will cause splotches if used too bright/excessively, and are easily drowned out by actual light sources like the sun + revit lights.

Great idea!

Though, I do like having a dynamically lit skybox, which now that I think about it would just be what this feature does in the first place once the move/alignment features are put into it for the future. Maybe what I'm really asking for is a 3D skybox? 😋

Ohhh love the site context!

Would there be a way in the future to have the site model import on the skybox layer so it doesn't interfere with modeled topo (and would look perspective correct at ground)? Bonus would be that it would be friendly on performance too. We often have topography modeled already based on accurate survey data for the plot we are building on, but obviously this doesn't include context for anything outside the survey data. Being able to load a helpful semi-accurate skybox of the surrounding region could help a lot. Unless the site context feature is planned to support incorporating already-modeled topography somehow in its future.

I would suggest setting your phasing material to be something that has a "cutout" texture applied to it (maybe a repeating pattern of dots) and within Enscape's material editor set the material type to plant as well (that way lighting passes through it).

Really in love with this update as a revit user! Speeds up my accessory placement and pano exports big time. Now the final piece would be to allow the material editor to work for enscape assets + be saved out as custom variations