Revit Rendering. I’ve stopped rendering.
Enscape™ does in seconds what takes hours and more and I’m never pushing the Revit rendering button again. Never will I spend countless and thankless hours with Revit renderings:
- Tracking “Cloud Credits”
- Cancelling renderings mid-render after realizing something was missed.
- Exporting from Revit to send to a 3D specialist only to wait hours or days to get back a high quality image.
- Tweaking, tweaking and more tweaking to get view angles, sun angles, materials, lighting, reflections, etc. “just right”.
And I’m never going back. It’s finally possible to walk-through a project with a quality that surpasses rendering. And the only person happier than me? The Client. Because for less than $500 (quite easily the time and expense of creating just one high-quality photo-realistic Revit rendering) you can purchase Enscape for an entire year.
Or consider this: the $45 monthly license costs less than the 15 minutes of billable time you’ll spend presenting, discussing and approving the purchase of Enscape with your project manager. Standalone and floating license pricing here.
Adam told me about Enscape last summer and my bullshit detector immediately went 4-alarm. Real-time visualization is amazing but the workflow is busted. By the time you export, post-process, add lights, tweak materials and more the design changes – and the whole time consuming process starts over. We still use the Unreal™ Game Engine for real-time visual simulation on incredibly large and complex projects. But what about the other 99.999% of building and infrastructure projects? Real-time takes hours and days but the customer expects something now. And the results in Enscape? Amazing. It’s like someone took Revit’s “Realistic” View to an entirely new level.
After downloading and installing the Enscape plugin for Autodesk Revit™ (2014, 2015 and 2016) over here, I launched Revit. Next, I pressed the Start button on the Enscape tab in Revit. My jaw hit the floor.
The Revit project looked like this:
But the Enscape pop-up window looked like this:
The image above is straight out of Enscape. No Photoshop. No bullshit. After spending decades honing rendering skills, I was immersed in a sublime quality and subtlety of material, lighting and reflectivity would normally take a rendering expert literally days of effort. And then I walked around.
Enscape is not merely real-time. It’s real-time in real-time Revit rendering. No more exporting to update. Whenever I made a change in Revit rendering, the Enscape window automatically updated. As we used to say in Revit, “A change anywhere is a change everywhere!” Well, same can be said of Enscape.
Who’s going to love Enscape? All of us that expect a lot from Revit and know how to use it well:
- Me: Side by side with Revit on one screen and Enscape on the other. Instant feedback.
- My Team: Project Managers, Consultants and Builders that need to experience and explore in order to remove the time, cost and stress of uncertain and time-consuming decisions.
- My Customer: Owners that want to fully understand their design and see design options in order to make clear and actionable decisions. Nor do they want to waste days anxiously waiting for high quality renderings and marketing images. Open up a screen share, show them the view and save.
If your computer is able to handle Revit it’s probably more than capable of running Enscape. I’m running Revit 2016 via a 2012 MacBook via Bootcamp – not exactly a high end gaming rig. Most projects launch in less than 30 seconds and the navigation speed is more than impressive.
Training? What’s training? If you know how to use Revit rendering that’s pretty much it. Navigation in Encape is WASDQE and immediately familiar to those of us who’ve played 3D computer games. Whatever you see in Revit is displayed side-by-side in Enscape: Active Phases, Design Options, Visibility Settings, Levels of Detail – even Temporary Hide / Isolate. Gotta love that new Selection Box tool in Revit 2016 for quickly isolating a room or selection for viewing in Enscape.
But what if you want to export the real-time environment and go to a meeting? That feature is just around the corner too (via the @Enscape3D Twitter feed):
If you scroll down in the @Enscape3D Twitter feed, you’ll find some amazing images by major motion picture set designer @Bryan_Sutton. At the moment Bryan’s working on Star Trek Beyond and can’t post images of that project. But he has posted impressive images from previous set designs in Revit and they’re stunning to say the least:
For the last two months we’ve been passionately working with select early adopters to get real-world feedback and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. And last week we added more fuel to the fire at Autodesk University, where we were able to show some of the most amazing design companies in the world demonstrations of Enscape. Lots of high-fives and OMGs! Now it’s time to pop the clutch and push the pedal to the metal!
Suffice to say that Read | Thomas is incredibly proud to partner with Inreal Technologies GmbH to help bring Enscape™ to market. The Enscape team is really great but they’re in Germany and we’re in Charlotte, North Carolina. So if you’re in North America, we’re closer to your time zone and standing by to give your team an online presentation, answer questions and even provide technical support while using Revit with Enscape.
Then don’t be surprised if the next thing you do is download the trial, install the Revit plugin and join the future of real-time in real-time!
You’ll understand why I’ve stopped rendering. And you’ll stop rendering too.