Custom Skybox in Enscape

More and more clients are coming to expect high quality graphics to represent their multi-million-dollar projects. Luckily the team at Enscape  is hard at work, making this task unbelievably easy. From realistic textures, to entourage  & clutter, and even allowing you to wrap your project in the real world. That’s right, even though Enscape comes with great backgrounds, it is possible to create custom skyboxes for your projects.

It used to be that a custom 3D background was only possible using an HDRI file, and this is still true for many other rendering programs. And, while Enscape still supports that format, it can also use a simple JPG/PNG photosphere image (with some format limitations).

This article will walk you through the steps of creating an amazingly realistic custom background for your project using Enscape. Keep in mind that the same process applies to Revit, Rhino, SketchUp and ArchiCAD.

Pictured below is one of the sample sites I chose for this article, which is a city-owned park juxtaposed to the harbor of the world’s most inland port in Duluth, Minnesota (USA), where I live.

Pictured next is the Richo Theta S mounted on a tripod in the center of the site. This is a rather tall tripod; about seven feet (2133 mm) tall. The catch here is that nearly all views from within your building will have the same exterior view (i.e. from the 2^nd floor and the 20^th floor). For a taller building, you would have to get the photosphere from a drone. Then, the skybox can be changed depending on the current location in the building.

Here is an example of the image being prepared in GoPro’s Fusion Studio, and then rendered to a rectangular, flat-Earth-map, type image.

We will use the GoPro Fusion camera results for this first example. The following image is from the same tripod location shown previously. Both cameras allow the image to be taken remotely via an app on your mobile device. However, for both cameras, it is not possible to get far enough away, at this site, to avoid being pictured in the image.

Thus, a helpful tip is to quickly move to another location, relative to the un-moved tripod, and take another picture. I say “quickly” so the clouds or any people who might be in the background do not move too much.

Now that we have two images, lets take them into Photoshop. We will place each image on its own layer, as shown here.

Notice the top layer is turned off here.

On the top layer, simply use the eraser tool to remove the photographer (i.e. me). I like to have the eraser set to have soft edges to help blend any difference between the two images.

The result looks like this, but we still have the tripod and its shadow shown in the frame. So, I select this area using the Photoshop’s Laso tool and then press the Delete key. Per the dialog shown below, I use the Content-Aware feature to automatically fill in the deleted area to match its surroundings.

And here is our final, Enscape-ready image!

The results are amazing! Hover over the image to see the effect from changing the time of day within Enscape. Notice the sun shows up through the skybox.

I always say that reflections on a material are useless unless they are reflecting something, and preferably something real.

The Depth of Field also works well with a custom skybox. Hover your cursor over this image to see it change.

Here is another example from a different location in the proposed design.

Again, notice the reflections of the real-world environment on multiple surfaces: floor, table and image on wall. So cool! It is hard to achieve this effectively in post processing.

If the time of day is set to early morning or late evening, the skybox brightness setting can be reduced to make it look more accurate. Otherwise it would always be the same brightness and detract from the believability of the image.

Also in the Enscape Setting dialog is the Use Brightest Point as Sun Direction option. This will automatically reposition the sun, so it casts shadows that match the photo! Speaking of lighting, it is also interesting to note that skyboxes are emitting a little bit of light, but cannot offer IBL (image based lighting) as with HDR datasets.

Here are a few more examples, all from images I took in a single Saturday morning trip!

Yes, those are really mid-April ice chunks in Lake Superior! The lake never really fully freezes over in winter, but when it is -30F some areas do freeze and it then takes a while for them to melt; the year-round average water temperature is 39 F (4 C) degrees!

More reflections…

For more on this topic, and where to get free skybox files, be sure to check out this Enscape Help page: Skybox as a Background

It is easy to see how much more realistic your renderings can be in still images, real-time and VR. Give it a try and share your results!

Please get in touch via twitter @enscape3d and @DanStine_MN .