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. 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.

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.

NVIDIA Global Illumination Denoiser – Improves denoising of ray-traced diffuse and specular global illumination, powered by NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) SDK.

Auto Resolution – Dynamically reduces the resolution to ensure a smooth navigation and frame rate. If deactivated, the native window resolution will be used. This has no effect on rendered export.

Auto Upsampling – Upsampling is automatically activated in case the graphics card runs out of memory during capturing. Disable in case of quality degradation.

Grass/Carpet Rendering – When disabled, a slight performance increase can be had, but carpet and grass will geometry will not be rendered.

Restmode – When enabled, animations will stop a few seconds after you cease movement in the Enscape viewport.

Apart from the mentioned settings, there are also the Resolution settings affecting only the export quality of still image renderings and panoramas, 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 the following two settings will improve the output quality while either increasing render time, or output size. The resolution settings are located in Visual Settings window under the Output settings tab.

• General Resolution
  Select the export resolution for your still image renderings using this dropdown menu. You can either choose your window resolution, any of the given presets, or a custom resolution up to 8192 x 8192 pixels. Please be aware that exporting renderings in such high resolutions can overwhelm your graphics card, in extreme cases causing Enscape to shut down.

• Panorama Resolution
  The Panorama Resolution allows you to choose the quality of the panoramas generated using Enscape. You can choose a resolution from “Low” (2048 x 1024 pixels), “Normal” (4096 x 2048 pixels) to “High” (8192 x 4096 pixels)