How to best use Enscape and V-Ray throughout your Revit design workflow

NORBERT GRASER: Hello. And welcome to how to best use Enscape and V-Ray through a Revit design workflow. My name is Norbert Graser. I'm an application engineer here at Enscape. And I'm for more than 25 years in the AEC industry now worked with different tools. And now I have the great pleasure to show Enscape to [INAUDIBLE] together with my dear colleague Ana from Chaos. Hi, Ana.

ANYA LYUBENOVA: Hello, Norbert. And hello, everyone. My name is Ana. And I am a product manager of V-Ray for Revit. I am also a licensed architect in Bulgaria. And I have a vast experience with Revit.

Both of us are very excited to be here with you today. And we can't wait to start this class. But before doing that, let's jump to our agenda. What we are basically going to do today is that we'll see how you can explore and visualize your designs from early stages with Enscape to photorealism with V-Ray and how both our products can work together as complementary. Stay with us until the end of this demo for an exciting sneak peek of our upcoming developments. Without wasting more time, let's get back to Norbert.

NORBERT GRASER: Thank you, Ana. Yeah. So for me to introduce the new Chaos family. As you may have heard, Enscape and Chaos merged earlier this year. And our shared vision is to create an end-to-end ecosystem of 3D visualization tools.

Together with Cylindo, a 3D furniture product visualization platform from Denmark, we will continue to democratize visualization, making 3D AR and VR content more accessible to everyone here. We believe that this will allow us to focus on what we do best, and create better products, and meet more use cases rather than trying to create what the other is already doing.

So we want to make it seamless and quick to jump between the products without having to recreate scenes or other kinds of manual tedious work. Whether you have design and production teams in-house or you're collaborating with externals, we want the data exchange to be quick and easy so that you can spend more time on the important creative work. Let's discover how this workflow can look like within Revit.

We start with Enscape at the early design stage and we'll end up with some high quality presentation images created with V-Ray. So but what's Enscape? Enscape is a plugin that lives completely inside of Revit so you don't have to start external tools or worry about import or export. You can continue working on your Revit model while your renderings are instantly updated. And with just one click, you can explore your Revit model in VR and continue working on it. So let's jump straight into Revit and see what this is all about.

And so we start with simple model of a project based here in New Orleans. And we started Enscape by just clicking one button. And you don't have to take care of import, export, and other stuff. So it's just one additional window. It's an additional view on your model.

And from the first moment, you can experience your model in high quality. You get lights and shadows. You can switch between all your Revit views. You can change the time of day and sun settings by just pressing Shift and your right mouse and can enjoy your project while defining the details like cloud density and all of this in real time with a what you see is what you get to approach. And that's really the big difference in real time rendering because you don't have to wait to get the feedback but you instantly see what you are doing.

And really special for Revit and Enscape is that you can keep on working on your model while seeing the visual output in the Enscape window. So as we're doing here, you can-- yeah, pulling your map objects or creating walls, windows, and so on. And all of this is updated directly within the Enscape view. You also can use your different options. And so that's why we say this is an integrated workflow for your design.

And this is not only to produce high quality renderings but to have an additional tool to have more competence in your design because you're knowing what's going on. And when it comes to confidence, wouldn't it be great to just import your site context into this Enscape view?

We've introduced this with the last version of Enscape. And you now can import inside contacts from OpenStreetMap. And after a couple of seconds, you will see the scenery for show or for depending on how large scale you are importing this, up to what you can. Edit [INAUDIBLE] so setting the rotation and fine tuning the position of your buildings to the imported site context and of the depth and confirming the changes.

You can explore how your different design options will look like in the city context. For instance, in the context of New Orleans. And this context is used with all or can be used with all the different views that you have in Revit but you also can change between your different design options or you can have one like I have here with [INAUDIBLE] screenshot from OpenStreetMap and [INAUDIBLE] complete context together with my building.

And this again, this is not only about simple math models. You also can do this with your high detail or, let's say, higher detailed design model to explore how this look or how this interacts with the surrounding buildings, streets, and so on. And beside that site context, it's also really cool that you can keep on working on your model, also doing things like changing windows, creating walls, or whatever you are doing in Revit as soon as your BIM model gets updated, also your view in Enscape gets updated. And you can explore it while you're designing, changing few points and can share the view of it with colleagues in different ways. But that we will cover a bit later.

Besides changing the geometry, one part of designing is working on colors, materials, and surfaces. And everyone of you who is doing this in Revit probably know that's not the fastest workflow.

So with the integration into our Enscape material editor, you can edit this Revit materials and see instantly that feedback. And you also can use a large online library of Enscape and shift between different materials. And you get instantly feedback on your model and so you can explore different design options really fast and can play also with some fancy stuff because it doesn't cost you so much time and probably come up with some fancy other design and material ideas.

Another way to use materials is to import material packages that consists of textures, settings, and all the stuff that is needed to create that amazing looking render materials for Enscape and also for Revit. So all these settings are stored inside of Revit. And you don't have to save it somewhere else.

Like I mentioned before, it's just one click to switch to be our theme by just detaching somewhere on Google to your laptop. And then you can change and play with this or you can export your model to a standalone executable to be run on any other machine and use the VR experiences there.

And with this, I come to the next important point, communication and presentation with Enscape. So one point is to use Enscape to design or to create still renderings but you also can share your designs while you're working on it because communication and collaboration with stakeholders and other team members are the core aspect of the BIM method as far as I understand it.

And Enscape helps all the stakeholders to increase confidence into your design and your ideas to make better decisions earlier. And Enscape offers several tools to quickly and easily create and share high quality immersive experience. And I want to show you some of the tools we have integrated to do that.

What you see here is a bit more of context, a bit more of assets that we applied to the scene to make it looking realistic. But what you instantly see is that shouldn't that be grass or what should that green flat area be. In terms of data, yes, that's grass.

In terms of visual quality and material, that isn't grass but how to create grass. There's a really cool way with Enscape because, besides changing the color interactively, we also can change some material types. And we not only have generic materials but also materials like water, for instance. And please, yeah, change to water. And also we have some small animations on it to make it look better. And we can make it 3D graphics with just a click of a button.

And after applying that again, you can play with these settings. You can change the color or you can import presets from our 3D library. And what does this look like? Much nicer, isn't it? And these small parts that make things like this believable and real so it's materials and 3D props, entourage, or assets, or however you want to call it, just making things interesting.

And we provide more than 3,000 different efforts to create a nice looking theme, so like hundreds of cars and as easy as drag and dropping them into the theme, applying changes or moving, rotating, or scaling them. Probably cars shouldn't be scaled too much but with vegetation, quite often this is a good trick to make them look a bit different to just scale and rotate them a bit.

And with placing some of these assets into your scene, you can make them looking really more tangible to people. And that's the trick that quite often is done to create great visuals even if your building is quite empty as ours is at the moment. So it's just the effect that or the [INAUDIBLE] that we have created. If you're looking through the windows, you will notice that I think already. But anyway, that's what I want to tell you and probably one more you also can create custom assets.

So if you have special furniture that's not in our library-- and normally, it's just not possible to have everything in the library. You can go to a furniture manufacturer, downloading the 3D objects from them, and putting them as a custom asset in the library. And use them as one of the high quality assets like you have seen here.

And from here, you can create screenshots, or renderings as they are called. You can create 360 degree panorama standalone executables to be shared with others. Web standalone, short animations, and 360 degree panoramas is a point that I want to emphasize on as the last point to mention because this is really great. You can, from every standpoint you are, you can create this 360 degree panoramas which just one click in Enscape. Then you can upload them with the upload management function and uploading them to the Enscape server.

You can share them and as easy as sending or copying that QR code to someone else. You can hand over a link to that. If you want to try it out, you can use that link that you've just seen. And you can play within that scene in a panorama environment. And even better, if you have multiple panoramas from a project, you can create tours through it or a gallery so every picture and every panoramas are together and that's a fast and easy way to share information design ideas with colleagues stakeholders and other colleagues and other persons in the project. And I think this picture is already looking great. But sometimes great is not enough. And we are aware of that.

So both Enscape and V-Ray differ in the techniques they use to produce these images. And because of the specifics, we can see them as complementary in visualization pipeline. So let's review their strengths and weaknesses and just situations you would use each of them.

From the very beginning, Enscape's focus has been on supporting design workflow in real time. And we've done a great job in integrating visualization into the daily design process by consequently using the possibilities of modern GPU technology and our knowledge of the workflows and needs in architecture and design.

Enscape is one of the leading applications in this field today. In order to meet our demands for interactivity and integration, we have to make sacrifice in terms of physical accuracy in various areas. In most cases, that's not a problem at all. And our customers love Enscape when it comes to instant design feedback, design iterations and creative work on the model as well as fast and easy design communication. However, we also know that our results are not 100% photorealistic yet. There are times and situations which require it. In such moment, you probably better use V-Ray. This is also the perfect moment to hand over to Ana to tell us about V-Ray.

ANYA LYUBENOVA: Thank you, Norbert, for this great presentation. And in the next part of this class, I will guide you through what is V-Ray, in what situations should it be used and how, and, of course, how to combine it with Enscape.

We'll start with understanding what does photorealistic rendering mean. And I'm not going to get into technicalities here. But to make you imagine what photorealism means, I want you to think about the IKEA catalog. I believe everyone is familiar with it. So you will be surprised that none of these nice photographs of bustling rooms is a real photograph. These are all renderings. And they were all created with V-Ray.

What V-Ray basically does is that it lets you take photos of your Revit model, just like it would be done with a real world digital camera. And in doing that, with every photo it takes, it also has to simulate physical materials as well as physical light distribution. So it basically can let you go beyond the Enscape limits and achieve that ultra high realism you might otherwise lack.

Here I have prepared some more examples of images rendered with V-Ray. And it is very powerful for night exteriors with many lights as well as for interiors where the light bounces are many more. So being physically based, V-Ray allows you to create accurate simulations and lighting analysis of the indirect illumination coming from objects in the environment; any type of light, natural, artificial, or image based; as well as materials' unique reactions to light such as translucency and subsurface scattering, tinted glass surfaces, and, more specifically, how light passes through them, perfect mirrors with the ability to control the amount of rays that will be reflected, and even the ability to override how materials are seen in reflections or through transparent surfaces.

So at this point, you already might guess that such simulations take up a lot of calculations under the hood. And most probably you are wondering if rendering such a simulation will take long. While it will take longer compared to Enscape and the experience will not be as interactive as Enscape is, I can only assure you that rendering with V-Ray is not an issue in terms of time.

We've made sure that you can render even your largest models without the need of a supercomputer. Thus, for example, depending on your hardware, you can select whether to render using your CPU or your GPU or combine them both together in the so-called hybrid mode. In addition, there is a distributed rendering functionality which allows sending the render to other computers in your local network.

You can also send your renderings to our cloud rendering service. And basically, you will receive them fully rendered in no time. And another great timesaver is the ability to render a batch of images. If you want to render several images sequentially, you can leave your machine overnight and V-Ray will basically do the job or, alternatively, you can send that batch of images to the cloud.

While we have already mentioned some of the situations where you would want to use V-Ray, such as high end final renderings, lighting analysis, interiors, there is another area where V-Ray is very powerful at. And these are the fine details. Modeling very fine detail can be extremely time consuming. Besides Revit itself doesn't have all the tools you might need. V-Ray offers various tools that can help with that, such as displacement, which modifies the geometry at render time.

So you might already be wondering, what's the point of using both Enscape and V-Ray or when to switch from one to the other. So to wrap this up one more time, Enscape and V-Ray differ in the core rendering technology they utilize which makes them applicable to different scenarios in your visualization pipeline. If you need instant feedback on your designs and are still iterating over them, you would definitely stick to Enscape, whereas if you need to analyze how the true light impacts your designs or your designs are already finalized, you would switch to V-Ray.

Now we are going to review specific V-Ray features which can help you extend the visual quality of your Enscape designs. And we are starting with Light Gen. The Light Gen is a smart tool that allows you to generate lighting variations based either on an HDR image or the native Revit sun position. You can specify the altitude or azimuth variations of the sun as well as the number of variants to be generated.

The variants appear as a set of thumbnails which can be saved and reused just like I'm currently showing you. Clicking on a variant applies the respective sun position to Revit or, in case we are using an HDR image, that image will be applied to the various dome light. As it modifies the native Revit some, this feature could also be used by Enscape.

V-Ray also offers a large number of built-in textures which can help you achieve basically any look you can imagine. Besides procedural textures, which are mathematically generated and allow for recreating real life surfaces such as marble, rock, et cetera, there is a rich variety of utility textures which allow, for example, for compositing multiple textures together, doing color corrections, et cetera.

So my personal favorite ones are those that allow simulating randomness. So in this example, we will achieve a random look using a single material and the texture which supports randomization based on various criteria. In our case, the randomization will apply to each piece of geometry where that material is assigned to.

So in the next example, we have added dirt streaks to the material to simulate weather or stained look like that. And if we combine both approaches, we can basically control where exactly the dirt would appear. And we can have randomly spread dirt streaks.

And the last example we are going to review is the Light Mix feature which allows you to modify the lights after the image has been rendered. Before rendering, you only need to select how you want your lights to be grouped. At the end, you will be able to modify them based on the selected grouping method.

Revit groups and file linking are, of course, both supported. So here I have experimented with the night setup of this same model. And in the Light Mix panel, my lights appear as they have been grouped in Revit itself.

Light Mix basically lets me enable or disable light groups, change their intensity, increase it or decrease it, as well as to change the filter color. With that, you can achieve countless options in terms of lighting color, and intensity, and the variety of combinations. And once you're happy with the results, they can be saved as a preset. Thus you can have several presets and swap them.

So in my case, I have a couple of presets. I'm switching between them. In addition, I can also do some layer compositing, again within the very frame buffer, or in my case I also enabled the lens effects which allow me to basically simulate artificial lights the way they would look like when captured with a real world camera.

And now I am very excited to share with you what we have been working on ever since the merger happened and what we call the V-Ray bridge. So there has always been that gap between design and production visualization. And it basically looks like that. As you can see, no environment conversion, no assets, and bad looking materials. So every time you wanted to bring the design to photorealism, you had to start over from scratch.

So bridging that gap will save time that can be spent on making better design decisions or pushing towards a higher graphic quality. We basically want to eliminate that tedious and frustrating work so that we can enable and empower the creative work.

So let's see what we've done. And we will start with transitioning the Enscape sky. For that purpose, I am hiding all the Enscape 3D assets. And I have also enabled the global material override so that we don't get distracted and focus only on the sky. And with V-Ray 6, we are adding the cloud system settings, which are basically the same as those in Enscape.

We are still looking for a way how to match the values from Enscape so that it is basically a one click conversion. But another approach that I used is that I exported a panorama from landscape with my model hidden. And I have added that panorama as a background image in V-Ray. And if we now compare the results looking only at the sky, this is what we get.

So next step is that I will enable the Render Enscape Materials setting. And this will automatically convert all Enscape materials to V-Ray. And we will see them indicated in orange in the V-Ray's appearance manager. And if I now render, I see that things are looking quite good already. And if I want to change something from within Enscape, it will also apply to my V-Ray rendering.

What Enscape basically does is that, under the hood, it has its own parameters which are not considered by V-Ray up until now when V-Ray converts the Revit materials. But from now on this is already possible. So another thing that I can do is that I can select my Enscape material and promote it to the V-Ray Asset Editor where I can add more parameters to it and take advantage of all the V-Ray material parameters. In my case, I have created a glass material in advance.

Now let's focus on the road. And as you can see, we can see how the texture repeats so it is not-- it doesn't look quite realistic and natural. And what I did is that I promoted the road material in advance but I haven't done any changes to it.

The only thing that I've done is that I associated each of its textures to what is called U replacement source in V-Ray. And here with the click of a button, you can achieve a seamless texture. And as you can see, now it looks way better and more natural. And the last thing that we are going to adjust in terms of materials is how the grass is seen through reflections.

And for that purpose, I have prepared a V-Ray override material which is using the grass as a base. And as you can see, we have the grass material here. But in reflections, we see another material. It is yellow on purpose so that you can see how it works. And now I will select that material in the V-Ray Asset Editor. And I will enable the texture which I have prepared for it.

So at this point, we are ready to hide the 3D assets which were hidden at the beginning. And we can render with them. So all these trees, entourage, and surrounding buildings are actually Enscape 3D assets from the library. And here I will just add some final tweaks like, in this example, I'm adding the fog effect which is observed at the horizon.

V-Ray offers a variety of fog effects. And they're pretty powerful. And let's compare both our images again. Pretty close, as you can see. Most of the conversions are one click. So one thing that I would like to adjust now is the final colors. I have done this in advance and now I will just load my final image where I have, for example, tinted the fog.

And I have adjusted some of the planting colors using the layer system of the V-Ray Frame Buffer. And this is how it works here. I will create an exposure layer because I want to make the road a little bit darker in order to match with what I have in Enscape without having to rerender my image. So I adjust the exposure. And as you can see, only the road now became darker.

And with that, I have my final image. And this is a comparison of what we have from Enscape. And this is the result we get from V-Ray. At this point, we are researching possible workflows to also transition the Enscape grass to V-Ray. While we want to do that in a single click just like we did with materials and 3D assets, the challenge we've been facing relates to performance.

As you can see on this image, V-Ray generates individual grass strands. So if you have a huge grass field in Enscape, an instant conversion to V-Ray might cause serious performance issues. So things you could do in addition with V-Ray grass include controlling parameters such as density length and taper of the grass strands with the texture, adding a separate material to the strands, et cetera.

So to summarize everything, we believe that the V-Ray bridge will facilitate the collaboration between architects and designers on one side and visualization specialists and 3D artists on the other. They will be able to effectively exchange work without data loss, without having to recreate anything from scratch, and will be able to focus on the actual creative work. And as you could already imagine, this will save time and costs.

Our plans for the future include extending the bridge and providing maximum interoperability between our products. Being able to seamlessly continue your Enscape designs will open the doors to workflows that haven't been possible up until now yet some of them have been highly requested such as object animations.

Now that this class is towards the end, we couldn't think of a better way to summarize what we presented but showing you some amazing work of our customers. We hope that you will enjoy it and that it will inspire you to try out our products.

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We would also like to thank everyone for attending this class. And we wish everyone a happy rendering with Enscape and V-Ray.

NORBERT GRASER: Thank you.