Posts by TowerPower

Has anyone had any luck getting this to work? I've never been able to open the Enscape material library succesfully, including with the latest 3.3 release. A small dialog box appears in the Windows ribbon under sketchup, but nothing ever appears on screen. To unfreeze Sketchup, I have to x out of it.

Thanks Demian Gutberlet I'll give that a try. Is there a reason DLSS and VR don't mix well? From what you're saying, I also gather that raytraced sun shadows remain on while in VR mode. My understanding was there are certain settings that get automatically turned down or turned off to enable VR performance - things like global illumination and reflection quality - so I assumed maybe that would be the same case here. Given we have manual control over DLSS and sunshadows via checkboxes though, I can see why leaving them on might make sense.

I gather this is the end goal, what Lumion has: https://support.lumion.com/hc/…treetMap-in-Lumion-10-Pro Does anyone use Lumion these days and can comment whether the OSM feature is useful at all? I have to imagine someone uses it...

Hi, I've noticed VR performance in Enscape seems to have gotten worse switching from versions 3.1 to 3.3, and am wondering whether it has something to do with the introduced DLSS mode or raytraced sun shadow settings. It's odd, because in theory DLSS should have provided a boost to VR performance, but if other settings were turned up as well (like adding the full raytraced shadows in VR) those improvements could very well have been cancelled out or worsened.

It's always a tradeoff between graphical fidelity and performance (framerate), but in VR this becomes especially important. We use a 2080ti, so it's possible you're targetting faster graphics cards these days by cranking up the settings, and we're just falling behind. I hate having to switch from ultra to high mode in VR though, as you lose global illumination, which makes a huge difference on interior scenes.

nickflutter

I've had similar results testing between the Rift S and Quest 2. Originally I was thinking it might have to do with the extra gpu load required to compress the image and send it via wifi or link cable, but thinking about it more, my guess is it's primarilly due to the increased rendering resolution of the Quest 2, which is almost double that of the Rift S (3.5 mp vs 1.8 mp). The 2080ti we have in our VR room seems to handle it pretty well in most scenes, but the laptops just aren't fast enough.

Every new version of Enscape I've tried to install after 3.0.0+39546, the asset library won't load anymore. The window comes up like it's opening, but then it just churns and never does anything (both in Sketchup and Revit). Thus I've been forced to revert to 3.0 in order to still have access to it. I'm wondering if it's related to the fact that I checked to download the offline asset library in 3.0 and there's something incompatible with the 3.1+ versions of Enscape? I tried deleting the asset folder entirely to see if that would make a difference, but then it just came up with a warning that the library location was missing. I also tried uninstalling Enscape and doing a clean install but that didn't make a difference either. I don't know how to get out of this loop. Should I delete my Enscape Documents folder as well?

I agree that Enscape could use more high quality vegetation assetts. It's amazing how many plants you really need to fill out a library. There are some good ones already, just not nearly enough. Hopefully they'll accelerate their expansion of the plant library in particular.

Agreed - being able to pick and choose which views update geometry, and which ones just change the viewpoint, is really important. The old camera icons did the trick well I thought. In most cases when I create a new view in Revit, all I want is a new angle of an existing scene that's visibility is already setup in Revit.

Agreed. I really miss the ability to select the tiny camera icons next to each view in Revit, which allowed you to switch between viewpoints without messing with any of the other visibility settings (ie. no geometry turning on and off). As you say arnobat, sometime we manually hide things in a particular Revit view, and to need to go in and redo that work everytime we want to create a new view in Enscape is a complete waste of time. View Templates in Revit can only control so much.

The Unreal Engine Trello board (which has since been integrated into their website) is a really good example. They even include flashy little gifs of each new feature. I don't believe it's active for user feedback, but it's a public roadmap that shows people what's being worked on (primarilly the big picture items). https://trello.com/b/TTAVI7Ny/ue4-roadmap

That's annoying for sure. What I usually do is get the camera set up properly in Enscape, activating 2 pt perspective in visual settings and panning around with the left mouse button until I've got the alignment I like, then save the view as a scene in Sketchup. This creates a wierd looking scene inside sketchup, but for the purposes of saving the right camera angle in Enscape, it works at least. I agree it would be better if the two were linked properly, but assuming you're only ever going to render inside Enscape and not save views straight out of sketchup (or another renderer) it does the trick.

Is this DLSS 2.0 (or even the 2.2 version that was recently released) or just the old 1.0 version? I know they've made some huge improvements which is why I ask. I'm noticing some artifacts with it.

It's the Ambient Brightness Slider, right? The default is 50%, but turning it all the way up to 100% will eliminate ambient occlusion (or turn it down significantly). Personally, I usually go the other way, turning Ambient Brightness down to like 10% or less because it makes the shadows and contrast feel more realistic on interior scenes. The default is washed out and lacks definition. It will make the scene much darker overall, but you can turn up the exposure or artificial light brightness slider to bring it back within an acceptable range.

Quote from Pieter

Although I personally don't mind how the current release works, I do have sympathy for Herbo's (and others) concerns.

Perhaps part of their frustration is that what they are proposing (keep the settings in the render window but don't start the renderer automatically) seems like a good solution, without compromising on the advantages of the current design of having the settings integrated in the frame buffer. It also (perhaps wrongly) sounds like relatively simple to implement. But maybe it's waaay harder than it sounds, and is that also part of what's holding you back?

It's been awhile since I've used it, but I believe this is the way Thea Render worked. The full render dialog box would comes up every time, but it would only begin rendering if you wanted it to. This made sense and was necessary for a non realtime renderer, but I think the same principle could apply with Enscape. If I had to guess, the vast majority of Enscape users won't have a problem with the way 3.0 is setup currently, but a loud and frustrated minority will. Most of my models aren't large enough to present an issue, but I've had some in the past that are, for which I've had to turn the render settings down and switch to White mode in order to get the model to load succesfully. It's a real issue and deserves attention. It seems to me it would be easy enough to add a check box, similar to the RTX dialog now, which you turn off if you don't want Enscape to automatically begin rendering on startup. Most users will never mess with it and it will continue to work just as you've designed it. For the small minority that do need it however, it will ensure Enscape continues to be functional. Win win.

+1

Quote from jiminy-billy-bob

Not really, Placemaker doesn't use Google Earth's data. They use 2D and 3D data from Nearmap.

You have to pay because Nearmap provides a paid service, accessing their data is not free. And I guess Mind.Sight.Studio probably takes a small margin on top of it to cover their own costs as well.

Interesting, I guess I didn't realize the degree to which the two services are distinct from one another. This quote from their CEO seems to explain it well.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-n…-better-than-Google-Earth

Very cool, nice work Herbo! Extracting photogrammetry data from Google Earth has long been a wish of mine, and I'm glad to see there's finally a practical way to do it.

Has anyone else seen the new 3d Textured Mesh Cities option from Placemaker though? I believe they must be using a similar process to yours to get the GE data into Sketchup. The catch is you have to pay for it and it only appears to be available for North America and Australia at the moment. Given how involved the import process is though, I could see it being worth it for a lot of folks. They have a price estimator if you scroll to the bottom of their page, around $200/ sq. kilometer, which isn't bad unless you're trying to download a whole city...

https://www.suplacemaker.com/3d-mesh-cities/

Add my upvote for high quality vegetation assets. You've made some great additions to the library over the past year including the many potted plants that were included, but the number of exterior trees and plants remains rather limited. The Evermotion ones are in general pretty high quality, we just need more of them. And ditto for the advanced grass system others have mentioned. Skatter is nice, but it's not very practical for larger site models, so the more things can be automated, the better.

I'm sure it's possible - other companies such as the Wild already support the Quest, but with very basic graphics (think Draft mode in Enscape) and a fairly limited model (polygon) size. The Quest 2 is much more powerful than the first, so I'm sure the supported size of models will go up significantly now.

Great suggestion, I run into the same thing as well.