Posts by TowerPower

  • Preview version: 2.6

    Just to clarify, is RTX support still disabled in the latest preview release I assume? The mention of improved shadows and reflections makes me wonder, but I gather it's just another feature where RTX will speed up performance and/or hopefully allow for additional bounces and higher sample counts.


    Quote

    Improved ray tracing quality

    Compared to previous versions we’ve enhanced lighting calculations and accuracy of our ray traced reflections significantly: More detailed lighting in reflections, including objects casting shadows, texture maps and correct display of cutout materials, raise reflection quality. The same technology also increases the accuracy of indirect lighting in Enscape 2.6: Especially interior scenes with artificial lights benefit with less indirect light leaking and more pronounced indirect shadows.

  • Preview version: 2.6

    Unreal 4.22/23 includes a path tracer for reference, and I know you guys said you have one you use internally for testing image quality. Perhaps that could be included in the public version of Enscape for final render outputs? (or at least as an option to turn on). I realize that's antithetical to the whole point of Enscape, which is realtime interactivity, but perhaps it would satisfy the folks who want full V-ray quality, even if it means waiting a minute or two. The realtime version continues to get better and will no doubt catch up in quality eventually, this would just be a stop gap.

  • Recommended GPU - Graphics card?

    Quote from Clemens Musterle

    Sorry to disappoint, but RTX based ray traced shadows are currently not in development. That's a feature that might come some time in the future, but RTX integration right now is basically a replacement for our existing path tracing implementation that does reflections and indirect lighting, but with better quality.

    Here's hoping shadows make there way into the list of RTX features next, especially since it sounds like that's one of the areas where ray tracing can actually outperform rasterization (ie. not only more accurate, but faster as well).

  • RTX?

    It's also worth noting that at GDC a few weeks ago, Nvidia announced that it would be turning on RTX support for a select number of 10 series cards, meaning Enscape could support them too. The major caveat of course is that since the Pascal series lacks the dedicated raytracing cores of Turing, they're orders of magnitude slower, so performance will likely be too low to be acceptable for usage in real time, but perhaps they can enable it for still renders only.

  • ENSCAPE 2.5

    Quote from Alex.N

    Guys, I understand that you might not have the material editor ready for ArchiCAD just yet but why are we paying the same price for a product that clearly doesn't function equally with other versions?


    As Damian Gutberlet said "but since ArchiCAD is our newest integration, it is currently not as "complete" when it comes to some functionalities"

    To be fair, the same has held true for all the software implementations since Revit. Sketchup didn't have a material editor for the first several months when it was released, yet we paid the same then. Rhino didn't have a material editor for the first several months when it was released - yet we paid the same then. If fairness is what you're looking for, we've all gone through the same thing (or looking at it another way, we've all been treated equally unfairly 8o ). I understand it's frustrating, but they can only move so fast. And the truth is we're all paying for the same thing. This isn't V-ray with dedicated plugins for every piece of software. We all get access to Revit, we all get access to Sketchup - the fact that we choose to use one software over another is our choice, but Enscape is still a holistic package offered to everyone the same.

  • Enscape 2.5 (sketchup especially)

    Quote from Nuge

    TowerPower


    I just want the functionally that has been promised and paid for, bring all of the plugins up to the same standard BEFORE releasing new features is my main gripe. I understand that the developers cannot satisfy all user requests and i am not asking for that, but selling me an incomplete versions for the same price is just wrong


    JUST UPDATE IT SO WE HAVE PARITY nothing more nothing less

    I feel your pain - I'd be frustrated if that were the case too. There was a time not so long ago when Sketchup didn't have a material editor either yet Revit did. Sketchup folks were clamoring for Enscape to release one, and while it took awhile, it was worth the wait when it finally came out. We were paying the same price then as we are now for less features than Revit, just as you'll still be paying the same price when they release a material editor for ArchiCAD. I suppose the alternative is they could simply have not released an ArchiCAD version at all, and waited until they had time to develop the material editor, but would you want that either? Last I heard Enscape had over 30+ employees, so chances are there's someone working on the material editor currently. And while it's nice to think that if everyone at Enscape dropped what they were working on currently and just focused on that it would be done in no time, I'm not sure that's how things actually work. Too many cooks in the kitchen, as they say. Things take time, and you can only accelerate them so much.


    Full disclosure - I haven't been following the developments with ArchiCAD closely, so it's possible I'm way off base here, but I suspect it isn't going any slower than it did for any of the other software.

  • Enscape 2.5 (sketchup especially)

    I've noticed this is a common theme with pretty much all pieces of software today. The die-hard users (ie. those speaking out on the forums) are never satisfied, no matter how much is being done to develop the software, and there's always something that doesn't work or needs to be implemented. It never ends. Humans are great at taking things for granted. In my opinion, Enscape is near the top in terms of quick development cycles and responsiveness to user requests, much better than most companies. This doesn't mean we shouldn't keep requesting things and advocating for improvements, since we all want to see Enscape get better, but I get the impression you all don't appreciate it as much as you should. I think the new asset content is great and worthwhile, and while they haven 't released it yet, they've also been working on RTX implementation, which in my own biased opinion eclipses all of the requests above ;) I'd love to see displacement and rounded edges too, but understand that not everything can be done at once.

  • RTX?

    Quote from jan1

    so u will bound your software with specific hardware ?

    It already is bound by specific hardware; older/weaker graphics cards won't run Enscape at all, and for VR they recommend a 1070ti or higher.


    Granted, I understand your concern. There are a relatively small number of RTX cards out there at the moment, and they're expensive. To make Enscape dependent on them to do certain features seems unfair to all those who don't have access to the cards. Unfortunately, with a disruptive new technology like RTX, sometimes that's the price of progress. I applaud Enscape and others for taking advantage of the new features now, which in turn should lead to greater adoption of dedicated raytracing hardware in the future (hopefully offered by AMD as well).


    That said, from the sounds of it, you may still be able to do most of the same things on older cards like the 1080ti, just at lower speeds and/or lower fidelity. As Thomas explained, Enscape already uses raytracing for a number of features, and is one of the only real time engines that supports path traced global illumination. They've been able to accomplish many of the lauded features of RTX even without dedicated hardware for a couple years now. This will just make it that much better!

  • RTX?

    Quote from Thomas Schander

    Micha RTX will bring little performance improvement to VR as the pure ray traversal in VR is not the bottleneck.


    TowerPower Internally, we also use a super high quality reference path tracer. But these reference path tracers lack any tricks and hacks (hence reference) and therefore they are a few hundred times (at least) slower than Enscape. Does not make sense to release it. But we intend to move at least the Ultra configuration very close to the visual quality that the reference provides.

    Thanks for the explanation Thomas, that sounds great. Regarding VR then, it sounds like there will be no improvements to framerate as a result of the RTX cores, but since ray traversal isn't the bottleneck in VR, are you then saying you'll be able to turn on RTX features in VR with no performance hit? If so, that's incredible.


    One other benefit I'm curious about is light leaking. Given that raytracing is very good at calculating occlusion (for shadows, ambient occlusion etc.), is light leaking no longer going to be a problem?

  • RTX?

    Looks like Unreal just officially released 4.22 with RTX support: https://www.unrealengine.com/e…real-engine-4-22-released


    It includes a number of raytracing features such as soft shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, refraction, and global illumination. There's also an interesting inclusion of a full path tracer, that they say can be used to test ones lighting against ground truth images. Makes me wonder whether Enscape might be able to have a similar option to be able to crank up the number of indirect bounces when rendering out still images and videos, for a little added realism (though only if it was going to take a few more seconds, not minutes, since that would be antithetical to the whole real time render thing).


    Either way, I'm really looking forward to trying out the new experimental RTX features now that 2.5 is out! I'm also curious whether any of the performance enhancements will carry over into VR.