When rendering in Draft mode, only direct light will illuminate your scene. In real life, light will bounce off surfaces, lighting up the environment. With Draft Mode, this process is disabled, ensuring maximum performance in Enscape. Reflections are also affected by this setting and  in Draft Mode, reflections will be heavily simplified, showing more of an estimation of the environment of your project than the project itself. This mode, however, apart from granting great performance, can be useful for anybody not interested in lighting their scene at all. You’ll get almost an equal brightness, regardless of where in your project you are, although the result of course won’t look as impressive.

This is where Enscape begins to show off its impressive Path Tracing abilities. Light will now bump off the first surface it hits, taking information such as the surfaces color and intensity, eventually hitting a second surface and illuminating that too. Reflections will begin to display the actual environment – although Enscape still uses a complex algorithm to determine what objects to display and what to hide according to their size and complexity, as we want to maintain an acceptable frame-rate, after all.

Setting the Rendering Quality “High” will improve the aforementioned procedures – lighting is calculated with even more precision, and reflections will hide less objects than on “Medium” setting. Colored glass will also affect reflections, indirect lighting and fog. Fog looks more realistic when it is lit through complex geometry like vegetation or small holes.

Lastly, the “Ultra” setting. The difference to “High” isn’t all that drastic and is essentially but two bounces of light rays are being calculated instead of just one bounce, resulting in an even more realistic image – but, frankly, you’ll rarely see the difference to the “High” setting at all. Not in non-VR, that is!

Since Virtual Reality has far higher demands on your computers hardware than non-VR Enscape, we’re using techniques to make sure you’re still getting the most fluent experience possible. This is why when VR is enabled, the rendering quality settings can generally be treated as one level of quality lower.

This means the “Draft” setting will behave as a more simplified version of the non-VR “Draft” setting, “Medium” can be compared to non-VR “Draft”, “High” will introduce the Path Tracing process mentioned above, and so on.

In addition to the Rendering Quality slider, there exists a set of further options that can affect the performance of your real-time rendering in Enscape. These are located in Enscape General Setting’s window’s Rendering tab and you can get more information about each of these settings here.

Apart from the mentioned settings, there’s also a few settings affecting only the export quality of still image renderings, panoramas and video files, but not the real-time performance.
To be precise, you could probably call the majority of available settings “quality” settings, depending on your personal taste, but these four will improve the output quality while either increasing render time, or output size.

All of these options are located in Visual Settings window under the Output settings tab.