Posts by Tim

  • Looking for GREAT wood textures

    Quote from Paul Russam

    If you do find a texture you like but it's not seamless then you can try this: https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/make-seamless-texture.php

    It'll do a reasonable job of making it seamless/tileable


    Nice find. I've had decent success with Materialize (see below). Usually when I find a tile or laminate pattern a client wants and I want to (try to...) make a better PBR out of it. Most of the time, I find the seamless stretching feature the most useful. It's basically blurring between the seams to varying success. But in a pinch it'll get the job done.


    I use: https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/

  • Looking for GREAT wood textures

    For paid, I usually go to Poliigon. They also have some decent free options. But if you do a month subscription, you can download mostly all you need with the credits they give you and cancel the membership. They're yours to own forever.


    For free:

    ambientCG - CC0 Textures, HDRIs and Models
    Free 3D Assets Never Looked This Good! Get 2000+ PBR Materials, HDRIs and more for free under the Public Domain license.
    ambientcg.com

    Textures • Poly Haven
    Hundreds of free PBR texture sets, ready to use for any purpose. No login required.
    polyhaven.com

    cgbookcase.com | PBR Textures, free for any purpose

    Free - Poliigon
    Download the perfect free assets for your next 3D project or search our thousands of other high quality textures, models & HDRIs.
    www.poliigon.com

  • Transparent (alpha channel) background PNG no longer working (can't adjust fog - old workaround)

    Quote from Clemens Musterle

    I would suggest to stick to the workaround you've discovered - keeping at least one placeholder transparent material around.

    Was about to reply the same. Will have to hide glass somewhere off-screen somewhere (maybe a hidden object?) in the meantime, which is really frustrating (I'll inevitably forget).


    Just tested a bunch of old releases all the way back to 3.5.1+109642 and the issue was still present. I won't go any further, as that's all the way back to June this year and at that point I'm losing a lot of updates and misc. bugfixes.

  • Transparent (alpha channel) background PNG no longer working (can't adjust fog - old workaround)

    Latest Enscape build released 10/26- I can no longer export transparent background PNG's with the synchronization camera in SketchUp OR the Orthographic projection mode within Enscape. I can set the Fog and get the alpha channel to export correctly if I disable the camera sync button in SketchUp and if I don't use the Orthographic view in Enscape.


    The Fog setting in this build now greys out with the required camera settings noted above and is not adjustable as it was previously, where I'd set fog to 1% in order to get the alpha channel PNG to export correctly. I can adjust fog normally with a different projection mode but it resets to zero when choosing the camera views I need.



    Edit:

    Downgraded to 3.5.4+ and the problem persists.

    Opened a previous file where I know I was able to export with an aplha channel and it works. But cannot get it to work on new SketchUp files, even using the same visual setting preset.

  • Better Grass Along Edges - What's the best method?

    Quote from HKM87

    The solution I see, is to have the edge between the grass area & the soil area drawn organically, not with a straight or curved line. The only issue it's a time consuming method, so keep that in mind.

    Even if I hand draw the grass/mulch line, the grass always seems to keep a "buffer" from the edge line, causing a noticeable gap where the texture shows. And also the cliff like edges of grass, even at low height.

  • Better Grass Along Edges - What's the best method?

    I don't do a lot of exterior landscape projects but have a few coming up and am struggling with the way grass acts along pathway edges. The grass/ground material underneath is visible along the edge and the grass edge seems like flat cliff, even with the lowest height setting.


  • Lighting issue

    Quote from Rick Marx

    Hi reznormerle


    We currently don't have this on our roadmap, however, you can share your feedback with our product management team directly via our portal, you can find more information on this here.

    Rick Marx Any updates on this? I have large retail models that require a LOT of lights and I get noticeable pop-in of light and shadow, even at close distances to the camera (see attached). I not sure I want to share these render videos for clients at this level of quality.


    Attached an example:

  • "Creating Custom .SKP Assets in the Asset Library"

    And this goes to show that value in this industry is not simply "rendering talent" but being able to manage and create asset libraries in a highly efficient manner. Something that's not plainly apparent from an outside perspective. I'm hopeful Enscape keeps plugging away at improving these tool sets - keeps me using the software exclusively and makes my job a lot less chaotic (or tedious, at times).

  • "Creating Custom .SKP Assets in the Asset Library"

    Quote from Kaj Burival

    Hey juditrjones , welcome to the Enscape forums!
    What exactly is the reason you'd like to include skp files in your custom asset library?
    Is it to multi-place them more easily? Or is it to show them with less detail in your SketchUp scene?
    There's the option to link skp files to placeholder cubes in your scene, are you aware of that? Maybe this helps already?

    I know for my workflow in SKP- I run obtained high poly OBJ/FBX files through Transmutr (or Skimp) and create my own SKP models with them (lower poly, custom materials, edits, etc). As juditrjones said, Enscape's Custom Asset Library "import" option excludes SKP models. I only now realize there is the "Linked Model" button as you have shown to get my models imported quickly as proxy's, which will work. I suppose what I'm really after is a single pane of glass, so to speak, to visually view all of my assets custom available. Better yet, if Enscape could apply a different proxy "shape" instead of the clear wire frame to these proxies via "linked models."

  • 2K vs 4K textures not noticable in Enscape

    Quote from andybot

    I would hate to spend my time trouble-shooting maps that are too large, much less imagine what the burden would be for average users like Adam.Fairclough describes.

    See, I didn't know they defaulted to downsampling and had spent a LOT of time trying to figure out what the heck was going on. At the same time, I was trying to figure out if a 2k map (or even 1k) would suffice vs a larger 4k version, while setting up my own material library.

  • 2K vs 4K textures not noticable in Enscape

    Quote from Paul Russam

    I’m perfectly happy to have that but the current setup (ie compressed) should be the default. If you want to have uncompressed/full fat textures you should be the one(s) burdened to change the checkbox.

    This forum is only visited by a small % of users and an even a smaller % ever comment, this thread has only 8 users (me included), I just don’t think it’s something the vast vast majority of Enscape users care about.

    I agree we're a small subset of users, but I'd hope they'd be listening to users that care enough to comment on functionality of the software. We also report and troubleshoot bugs often. Programming and UX design are two different animals and a user base's voice is pretty important on the UX side of things.

  • 2K vs 4K textures not noticable in Enscape

    Quote from Paul Russam

    For 95% of users, 95% of the time the current setup is perfectly fine. If you want to make use of full res textures for a particular situation then the ‘burden’ should be on you and not my GPU

    So then why do we have a quality slider built-in as well as further performance related options available withing the settings menu? By this logic, the solution is a dead simple checkbox in the settings menu - AUTO-SCALING MATERIAL RESOLUTION: ON/OFF. No different than any of the already available checkboxes:



    If a user is choosing to set up a custom material via the editor, I'll say it again - it's trivial to use a 1k map in the slots vs 4k (or 2K, etc) if they are concerned about performance. This functionality is already built-into the software and they can just remove the auto-scaling programming. For those that can't (or don't want to?), there are plenty of 1k maps available in the built-in material library.

  • 2K vs 4K textures not noticable in Enscape

    I'm still against some check is method because it think it's overly complex vs simply using appropriate maps. But, should that be the compromise, the check box should only be to downscale. Give users the ability to use the material maps they own and require.


    The burden of performance should be on the lower end machines to check boxes that lower quality in order to perform the task.

  • 2K vs 4K textures not noticable in Enscape

    Quote from jlo

    I could see a nice compromise would be to have enscape by default downscale unless someone specifically noted to not downscale a specific texture. A way to apply this easily might be to put a keyword in the file name like they already do with grass and metal reflections etc or maybe a checklist of some sort that poeople can check and the code would skip that texture.

    They've already made it very easy to place the appropriate material maps in the material editor, as with every other render engine. They've added the unnecessary complexity by choosing to automatically restrict/compress/downsize user-selected material maps in the background, without any documentation suggesting so (at least, I can't find any mention of it in the wiki pages). I spent way more time that I'd like to admit trying to figure out what what "wrong."


    I don't see how it's deemed difficult to simply let a user choose their own appropriate material resolution manually. It's trivial to replace 4k maps with 2k on the fly, as needed- or to create our own quality versions.