Enscape is a very popular render engine for interior architecture
it runs as a plug in inside revit sketchup etc.
it has three main great aspects
build in materials and assets like grass trees etc to keep your scene file small
enscape runs like a runtime engine using those build assests only during render time and placing just proxy objects in the host 3d app
it is ridiculously fast
it is also dirt easy to use (albeit limited capabilities)
Particularly point two sometimes makes it difficult to promote something different.
I noticed that interior GI can be pretty blochy so it looks like it is smoothing the GI map but textures etc look fine
optix etc smooth everything. while with LuxCore/Cycles you can get now a lighting feel just after two seconds of rendering texture blurriness will remain an issue.
Anybody some some ideas how Cycles could be brought to the speed you see with Enscape?
I see nobody picked this thread up, but I’d be interested to discuss some more.
For years I’ve been exporting from Revit to Blender and baking lighting in order to get accurate and fast-to-navigate models to show clients and review design coordination. They do get bogged down with large models though.
Enscape is a funny one. It can look great, but it has a few major disadvantages compared to baked lighting in Blender in my experience:
A. You need a decent machine with a discrete graphics card to make it usable. That makes it hard to distribute to some people, such as clients, as they often don’t have that sort of hardware. Even I don’t always have that hardware (e.g. my office laptop) and I’m an engineer!
B. It is very good at looking okay out of the box. Some nice tricks being used, I think. Though really isn’t it mainly just an ambient occlusion pass over the image textures? But I don’t know how easy it is to get to the next level of realism, given that it is doing everything on the fly. Which takes me to point 3 …
C. As it’s hung off proprietary software, it is limited in who can control it. My laptop can’t export to Enscape, for example, but that’s where my Revit license is held. Whereas I can export FBX/IFC to Blender and do whatever I like to the model and lighting. Might seem like a small technical issue, but actually it is why I have stuck with Blender despite having licenses for just about everything else. Nevertheless, you are quite right that once you’re set up, Enscape is gloriously easy to use and share models.
D. People (clients etc) don’t seem to mind, but the rough light calculation that brings the speed can also create some odd situations from light leakage (image below). Which reduces its value for visualising some spaces.
I’m about to start a separate thread on Revit-Blender-Bake which I’d be pleased to have your thoughts on. In the meantime, I’m going to see whether I can get AO over shadeless image textures in Cycles to replicate Enscape’s look and speed.
Okay, well after a fair bit of mucking about, I’m pretty sure I could get at least close to the Enscape look and performance using Eevee for the simple models I look at. A rough irradiance volume is crucial to get the overall lighting right, with AO and screen space reflections to add the noise and gloss that comes with Enscape by default. That way you get sharp textures and lighting immediately, without waiting for Cycles samples to generate.
Of course this is only scratching the surface of what Enscape can do, albeit it is the most relevant to my work. Next step is to download one of their more complex models and see how they look. There are suitable RVT and EXE files here: Enscape samples so I might give that a go.
My intention isn’t to replicate Enscape anyway. Just to understand how they do it. I’m not experienced enough with Eevee and the irradiance caches to know how long it would take to generate the cache for that sample file. It does seem like an Eevee-like approach is what they are using though.
